With Jingles training, you can sound the way you want to sound!

(This is Part 1 of a two-part blog installment. Part 2 will be released tomorrow.)

Dear Fellow Earthlings, One major goal of "The Jingles" is the protection of the Japanese language from being anglicized

even more so than it already has. One very obvious reason why Japanese people like to substitute

English words for so many native Japanese words is that they truly desire to speak English. To this,

I say: "By all means, learn English, master English, acquire English -- But please do not forsake the words

of your forebears merely because foreign words seem stylish to you. You are destroying something of

beauty when you brazenly forsake that which helped mold you." For this reason, when my staff and I are teaching Japanese people how to pronounce English, we

remind them that it is okay to be proud of their native accent when trying to speak a second or third

language -- but it is even better if they have the ability to code switch, that is, to know how to shift

their synergies to those resembling the synergy task dynamics employed by native speakers of their

target language. This will result in pronunciations much closer if not identical to pronunciations of

native speakers of the target language a given client is attempting to master. Until "The Jingles" came along, it was perfectly apt that adult learners of the phonology of a new

language should be proud of the way they sounded. The only other thing one could do would be

to constantly be interrupting kermself by saying "Excuse my poor English!" or by denying that the

people to whom kee was speaking were able to understand only very little of what kee was trying

to say. One excuse often put forth was that somehow the way we all sound comes from our ethnicity,

or perhaps even the thickness or thinness of our lips and so on and so forth. But the fact is that with proper target language "Jingles" training, ALL people can go a long way

towards bringing their target language allophonomes more and more in line with the primary

allophonomes employed by native speakers of a given target language. (This blog continues in tomorrow's installment.) Steve Walker Earthsaver and Jingles Creator

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