I think "phonetical spelling" is the worst bad joke in English.
Seriously. "a" is sometimes an /ə/ vowel (schwa, such as in "woman" or "a"),
sometimes an /eɪ/ diphthong (such as in "bake", "cater"),
sometimes an /e/ vowel (such as in "bait"),
sometimes an /æ/ vowel (am. "cat"),
sometimes an /ɑː/ long vowel (br. "task"),
sometimes an /a/ vowel (br. "cat"),
sometimes an /ɪ/ vowel ("break"),
sometimes an /ʊ/ vowel ("boat"),
sometimes an /ɔ/ vowel ("pause"),
sometimes an /i/ vowel ("beak")…
How's that phonetical, when you can't make heads or tails how a letter is to be pronounced? Using English spelling rules is extremely unsuitable for expressing pronounciation. You need to add extra letters such as "h" to work around the inconveniences of the spelling system to express what you want. And still you cannot express how to pronounce the Finnish name of Yliluoma (IPA: /yliluomɑ/), for example.
That's why I always use
IPA. Letters in IPA pronounciation keys are
always pronounced the same way no matter what surrounding context or what language they represent (with exception
allophones, which are miniscule variations in the phoneme).