Perilously Close to the Summit, the Game Changes....
Too many lifts and too many people can destroy a mountain!
Each language on Earth is a mountain-like testament to Earth's beauty.
Dear Fellow Earthlings,
For those among you who do Jingles:
You work hard. You follow all of the instructions. Your target language pronunciation level becomes similar to if not identical to that of native speakers. Where do you go from there?
Such is the experience of the extremely high-level Jingles client.
Sometimes clients set off on their own, seeking to develop other aspects of their target language, such as their conversational skills, their ability to switch dialects, their use of specialized vocabulary, their ability to teleconference, or their use of idioms, to list but a few client goals.
But as these clients pursue those goals, they suddenly lose track of the "core" items that got them to the top of the mountain in the first place:
1. They begin to incorporate smatterings of the speech motor skills application techniques of the
speakers all about them.
This leads to a dilution of their core pronunciations, of their primary synergies.
2. They fall prey to the attitudes of those people with whom they speak.
As a result, in trying to "fit in", the previously sharp motor skills that these clients worked so hard
to develop become blurred, become blunted, become dulled, -- and head off into directions that
are no longer those of native speakers... These clients need to keep their skills polished so that,
when called upon to do so, they can make their skills "stand out". It is much easier to go from
standard techniques to non-standard than from non-standard, contrived, stop-gap techniques to
standard ones.
3. They begin to feel alone, abandoned, left to fend for themselves.
No longer adhering to the primary synergy skills they worked so long and hard to acquire, these
clients begin to doubt their hard earned levels of competency -- and to lose their confidence
(and hence, their competence!).
They become overly concerned with judgments of those who in fact themselves are the ones who
should be judged!
The mountains we climb as we seek to develop our target language phonological expertise are not for the weak-hearted, not for those given to accepting the uninformed, confidence-breaking judgments of others.
What is more, those very mountains (that is, the standard phonologies of the target languages) should be preserved!
Just as Mt. Everest is now polluted from the abuse heaped upon it by climbers whose numbers are excessive and -- in some cases -- whose climbing techniques are abusive -- the sounds (indeed, the soundness!!) of our own "target language pronunciation" mountains can become compromised if we fail to employ proper mountain climbing -- or target language phonology acquisition -- techniques.
Steve Walker
Earthsaver and Jingles Creator
© 2013 Steve Walker, The Jingles-The Japan Foundation for English Pronunciation, Summit Enterprises.