This study book is a fundamental introduction to the field of phonetics as a sub-discipline of general linguistics. All areas of phonetics are thoroughly presented (phonation, articulation, acoustics, perception, etc.), and a brief history of the field is provided. The guiding principle of the introduction is the aim to represent the phonetic phenomena observable in spoken communication and the associated processes in the physical world as a utilization of our biological endowment for communicative purposes. Special emphasis is placed in the first part on the interplay of articulatory, acoustic, and auditory phenomena. The second symbolic-phonetic part addresses linguistic phonetics from the perspective of the use of these phenomena in the form of language-specific sound systems and suprasegmental systems.