Comment by mcswell

To be technical: the term is phonemic, not phonetic. If we spelled phonetically, we'd have different symbols for the p in 'spin' and the p+h in 'pin'. Similarly for 'tick' and 'stick', and 'scale' and 'kale'. Native English speakers generally don't notice the differences, just like speakers of many oriental languages don't easily recognize the difference between English /l/ and /r/.