The Jingles: Withstanding the Onslaughts of Change

Dear Fellow Earthlings,

Here in the waning days of the year 2020, even hindsight seems to lack 20/20 vision...

Airlines and tour boats are again attempting to pack their vessels -- packing our blood vessels with ever increasing amounts of particulates, melting our ice packs, turning all our rivers into warm water streams...

And in the meltdown of language diversity that accompanies globalization, instant translation/interpretation technology seems to be making traditional language into a half robot/half human product...

Amidst all of this The Jingles have to be changed -- not in their essence, but IN THEIR PURPOSE.

Suddenly The Jingles are mostly about business --- namely, the business of surviving.

My clients now find themselves doing Jingles not so much to sound "nativelike", but to survive in the sink or swim situation everyone is finding kermself engaged in. Jingles clients nowadays find themselves skipping over vast expanses of linguistic wastelands to reach their goals, their phonological destinations.

No longer is there a standard target language English to aim for. Rather, it is up to me, Steve Walker, to help my clients pick out their own phonologic -- indeed, their own linguistic/sociolinguistic -- goals.

In the maelstrom of chaos and confusion, new means will be employed in Jingles training. Of paramount importance is my decision to no longer provide unlimited numbers of regular mode measurements for Jingles clients whose Series A and Series B TRAINING MODE scores have attained the "perfection level" of 90.50.

For those who wish to have regular mode /applied speaking assessments, such assessments/measurements will be offered only for non-Jingles gestures. These gestures must be at least 5 minutes in duration.

Regular mode measurements will be offered a maximum of once every three months.

These extreme measures had to be made in order to:

1. Protect the emotional well-being/stability of my clients,

and

2. Maximize training time by lowering the amount of time spent on measurements.

Language competency, after all, is the ability to produce gestures recognizable to those whom we wish to communicate with -- and to have the ability to recognize the oral/aural communication attempts by others to communicate with us -- without regard to how poorly those attempts might actually be delivered.

The more you develop your Jingles, the easier it will become to interpret the production deficiencies of ALL people.

Finally, just as actually knowing how to do mathematical calculations provides more satisfaction than merely having a computer perform that function for you does, so too do the abilities to actually speak eloquently and to catch spoken communication attempts by others provide a sense of accomplishment and happiness that computerized translation and/or interpretation cannot match.

Steve Walker

Earthsaver and Jingles Creator

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