Our catch phrase is on its way.

The JINGLES

Dear Fellow Earthlings,

Among the thousands of people who are developing their English pronunciation through Jingles®training, some have to contact me directly due to the unfathomable nature of certain speech motor skills deficiencies that even my very excellent staff of Jingles instructors are unable to solve completely.

These cases crop up several times a week, on average. When they are called to my attention I am generally able to deal with them on the spot – or, in at most, two or three sessions.

Yesterday, I saw a client (“Mr. H”) who has been doing “The Jingles” for approximately three years. His problem, not surprisingly for a native speaker of Japanese, was poor quality of his tongue tip “L” sound. In view of his lengthy Jingles experience however, such a situation is very rare.

At present “Mr. H” is knocking on the door of nativelke American English pronuncaition (the “90” level®). After analyzing him yesterday, I can say that the only thing stopping him from reaching the native level is the overdevelopment of what is supposed to be a very subtle sound, the “non-tongue tip L“, referred to in Jingles jargon as “ l “.

This “overdevelopment problem” can be taken care of in one-to-three Jingles training sessions

-- such as I mentioned in today’s blog’s second paragraph!

The key to improving the quality of “Mr. H’ ”s L sound is to reassign his u/l/ul gestures

in his synergy hierarchy. For the reader’s information u is the gesture shown by the the underlines in “ago” and “temperament”, l by the underlines in “elk and “pal”, ul by the underlines in “suitable”

and “label”. These gestures are classified as “Synergy 3” (S3) gestures in Jingles theory, along with all suprasegmental gestures and the segmental gestures i iy, e, ae, uh, U, o, a, IR, iyR, eR, UR, oR, aR, ey, eyR, ay, ayR, oy, ey, eyR, ou, ouR, au, auR. sh, zh, k, g, ‘ , M, ng. W, R, F, V, p, b.

Check out tomorrow’s blog for how I will be helping “Mr. H” attain his goal.

Steve Walker,Earthsaver and Jingles Creator

© 2013 Steve Walker, The Jingles-The Japan Foundation for English Pronunciation, Summit Enterprises.