Abstract: An unambiguous phonics system (UPS) is capable of presenting text in a format with unambiguous pronunciation. The system can translate input text written in a given language (e.g., English) into a UPS representation of the text written in a UPS alphabet. A unique UPS grapheme can be used to represent each unique grapheme-phoneme combination in the input text. Thus, each letter of the input text is represented in the UPS spelling and each letter of the UPS spelling unambiguously indicates the phoneme used. For all the various grapheme-phoneme combinations for a given input grapheme, the corresponding UPS graphemes can be constructed to have visual similarity with the given input grapheme, thus easing an eventual transition from UPS spelling to traditional spelling. The UPS can include translation, complexity scoring, word/phoneme-grapheme searching, and other module. The UPS can also include techniques to provide efficient, level-based training of the UPS alphabet.