The vowel marks: above and below

mia melu thumela.
1SG friend teach.
(I teach a friend.)

melu has two vowels and two consonants: m·e, l·u. Neither vowel gets its own letter. Each rides as a tehta (a small mark) above the consonant that opens its syllable: the e-tehta sits over malta, the u-tehta sits over lambë. The Tengwar line above is exactly that: two tengwar, two marks, nothing else, each vowel's own shape distinct from every other vowel's.

All five vowels (a, e, i, o, u) have an above form. None of them look like each other, and none of them look like the tehta a consonant carries for the same vowel in hiatus (chapter 4). Learn a vowel's above shape by studying every worked example in this pamphlet, not by reading a description of it: a mark this small is easier to recognize than to describe.

Every vowel also has a second, different mark that sits below a consonant instead of above it, and chapter 4 is that mark's whole chapter: the one place Phi's Tengwar mode does something no vowel-carrier script does at all. Until then, every tehta in this chapter's examples rides above, because every syllable here carries exactly one vowel.

shonela is three tengwar and three tehtar (sh·o, n·e, l·a), read left to right the same way the romanization is: consonant, its vowel, next consonant, its vowel. Nothing in the Tengwar line asks you to look ahead or hold a sound in memory before you place it. A tehta answers the question its own tengwa just asked.