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Mother tongue is the type of language that people get from their parents. Those parents may be either native speaker of that language or have it as their second language. It is important to underline the possibility of a wrong use of grammatical rules of that language shared with their children. I agree with Amy Tan who wrote an essay: “Mother Tongue”. That author includes, “Language is the tool of my trade. And I use them all_all the Englishes I grew up with”. From my point of view, there are three essential points to be considered regarding people who do not speak proper English: Difficulty to make communication understandable, mistreatment of non-native American and transmission of broken language to family.
First, from my opinion, the difficulty to make communication understandable is the biggest handicap for most non-native American people. By trying to make sense of their sentences, immigrants use words (from their native language) added to English words already known by routine. Doing so, they create another type of language, in that context, called “broken English”. Between friends and family, the limited
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Thus, children adopt mother tongue at home because it is the type of language heard and learned since birth. The author wrote,” I was walking down the street with my mother and again found myself conscious of the English I was using, and English I do use with her. We were talking about the price of new and used furniture and I heard myself saying this’ Not waste money that way’”263). People issued from immigrant families and born in the USA communicate with limited English to their relatives. However; while communicating outside of their private circle, they speak properly to correspond to the American Standard English. By such linguistic adaptation, some immigrants ‘children earn respect and
In “Se Habla Español,” the author, Tanya, talks about her personal experience with dealing with language issues. Tanya was born in Guatemala and moved to the U.S when she was only three years old. Tanya’s mother did not want her to speak Spanish, because they believed that when they moved to the U.S speaking only English would help her blend in. For so long Tanya believed that speaking Spanish went hand in hand with being poor and speaking only English made her feel superior. After many years she has tried to learn Spanish but has found it quite difficult because although that is her native language it was like trying to learning a whole new language for her. In “Mother Tongue,” Amy’s explains how she has come to the realization that she speaks more than one “English,” meaning that the way she speaks in front of a crowd is different than the way she speaks with her mother. The way Amy speaks with her mother is still English although it is not proper. Amy expresses how she does not really like the phrase “broken English,” because if something is broken it needs to be fixed and she does not feel that her mother’s English needs to be
The first article is “Mother Tongue” by Amy Tan. The author tells a story of her relationship with her mother whose English is poor in comparison to that of most Americans. The author is well versed in English since she was schooled in the United States. (Tan 37) The author begins with an introduction to her mother’s style of language. She explains that it is her language that she and her mother share, and it is a “language of intimacy.” (36) Tan makes sure to point out that it is not difficult for her to understand what her mother says. After this introduction Tan begins to tell the reader about stories of how her mother’s limited English had affected her. She writes that she had been ashamed of her mother’s unintelligible English. Her story is about a time when she had to make a phone call for her mother and how she had noticed the way others passed her mother off as a nuisance. Her next story had a similar...
Mother Tongue by Amy Tan was one of the best short stories I have ever read and I am excited to analyze it. Tan was born in California to Chinese immigrants. She writes in her story about the struggles she faced with language. Tan makes great use of ethos, pathos and logos in her essay to make her claim that there are many Englishes, and none should be considered wrong.
Language can defined the type of person you become and it has an influence on our choices as well as lifestyle. Language itself has become a way of seeing life in a different perspectives. Tan discusses the many ways in which language has played a role in her life and the result from it. I can relate to Tan’s experience to some extent because I come from a bilingual household too. Just like Tan, I am one of my mother’s main source of communication with people who don’t speak spanish. I believe the notion of Tan’s “Mother Tongue” is stating that just because someone who cannot speak the English language perfectly, is considered less intelligent to many compared to those who can understand and speaks it fluently. But what makes us all unique is that it is rare to find two or more people who speak the same exact English. Even though both Tan and I helped our parent and come from different ethnic backgrounds; Tan came from a Chinese family while I came from a Hispanic family. We both share similar ideas about the language spoken in our household, and it was also a big challenge for both of us while we were being raised by an immigrant parent who spoke only “limited English”(Tan
Language is an important part of who we are. It influences the way we think and behave on a great scale. However, sometimes it is forced upon us to go in different directions just so we can physically and mentally feel as if we belong to the society in which we live in. Just as we see in Amy Tan’s “Mother Tongue” and Richard Rodriguez’s “A Memoir of a Bilingual Childhood”, both authors faced some challenges along the way by coping with two different languages, while still trying to achieve the social position which they desired.
In Amy Tan article “Mother tongue”, Amy Tan was talking about her love and fascination of language in daily life. Amy Tan explores the various forms of English that people from around the world use as they immigrate to the U.S. and how they are classified by the way they speak. Her mother plays a big role in telling of how her perspective on language has been changed. The author’s analyze the purpose and evaluate the effectiveness in her writing using persuasive devices to influence her audience. Through the article Amy use the various different rhetorical strategies such as the pathos and logos.
The Essay written by Amy Tan titled 'Mother Tongue' concludes with her saying, 'I knew I had succeeded where I counted when my mother finished my book and gave her understandable verdict' (39). The essay focuses on the prejudices of Amy and her mother. All her life, Amy's mother has been looked down upon due to the fact that she did not speak proper English. Amy defends her mother's 'Broken' English by the fact that she is Chinese and that the 'Simple' English spoken in her family 'Has become a language of intimacy, a different sort of English that relates to family talk' (36). Little did she know that she was actually speaking more than one type of English. Amy Tan was successful in providing resourceful information in every aspect. This gave the reader a full understanding of the disadvantages Amy and her mother had with reading and writing. The Essay 'Mother Tongue' truly represents Amy Tan's love and passion for her mother as well as her writing. Finally getting the respect of her critics and lucratively connecting with the reaction her mother had to her book, 'So easy to read' (39). Was writing a book the best way to bond with your own mother? Is it a struggle to always have the urge to fit in? Was it healthy for her to take care of family situations all her life because her mother is unable to speak clear English?
Tan, Amy. “Mother Tongue." 50 Essays: A Portable Anthology. 4th Edition. Ed. Samuel Cohen. Boston/New York: Bedford/St. Martins, 2011. 417-23. Print.
Growing up in a bilingual family, Tan can hardly escape from encountering phrases such as “limited English” and “broken English” for countless times. She dislikes the phrases as she mentions, “it has always bothered me that I can think of no other way to describe it other than ‘broken,’ as if it were damaged and needed to be fixed, as it lacked of certain wholeness and soundness. I’ve heard other terms, ‘limited English,’ for example. However, they seem just as bad, as if everything is limited, including people’s perceptions of limited English speaker” (634). People raise and teach their children the definition of “limited” as imperfect, “damaged and nee...
Despite growing up amidst a language deemed as “broken” and “fractured”, Amy Tan’s love for language allowed her to embrace the variations of English that surrounded her. In her short essay “Mother Tongue”, Tan discusses the internal conflict she had with the English learned from her mother to that of the English in her education. Sharing her experiences as an adolescent posing to be her mother for respect, Tan develops a frustration at the difficulty of not being taken seriously due to one’s inability to speak the way society expects. Disallowing others to prove their misconceptions of her, Tan exerted herself in excelling at English throughout school. She felt a need to rebel against the proverbial view that writing is not a strong suit of someone who grew up learning English in an immigrant family. Attempting to prove her mastery of the English language, Tan discovered her writing did not show who she truly was. She was an Asian-American, not just Asian, not just American, but that she belonged in both demographics. Disregarding the idea that her mother’s English could be something of a social deficit, a learning limitation, Tan expanded and cultivated her writing style to incorporate both the language she learned in school, as well as the variation of it spoken by her mother. Tan learned that in order to satisfy herself, she needed to acknowledge both of her “Englishes” (Tan 128).
The purpose of Amy Tan’s essay, “Mother Tongue,” is to show how challenging it can be if an individual is raised by a parent who speaks “limited English” (36) as Tan’s mother does, partially because it can result in people being judged poorly by others. As Tan’s primary care giver, her mother was a significant part of her childhood, and she has a strong influence over Tan’s writing style. Being raised by her mother taught her that one’s perception of the world is heavily based upon the language spoken at home. Alternately, people’s perceptions of one another are based largely on the language used.
Amy Tan, the author of The Joy Luck Club, talks about in the article, Mother Tongue, how her mother’s broken English would affect her daily life, how people treat her because of it, and how she felt about her mother’s language. She also talks about when she was in school she was pushed towards science and maths because of her cultural background, as an Asian American student; when she really wanted to write English and become an English major. In the beginning paragraph of the article Tan explains how she has to depict the different Englishes she uses through her daily life in writing and how she is able to deal with it.
If you are not fluent in a language, you probably don 't give much thought to your ability to make your personality attractive, to be in touch with the people and be understood in your world, that doesn’t mean you are an underestimated person. Every person has something special to make them more unique, remarkable, and gorgeous between people. The opinions could lead towards success, or those opinions could be one that is losing, and have a negative impact on how people connect with you. In Amy Tan 's “Mother Tongue” she made this book for several reasons. She had started her life by learning language, and she always loved to spend her time to learn language, but this story focuses about Amy Tan 's mother with her terrible English,
Lorna Dee Cervantes said that: “the children run to me, laughing, spinning me blind and silly. They call to me in words of another language.” (lines2-4) I can feel her loneliness through her poem. Because she doesn’t feel she is American or Mexican, even though she doesn’t know who she is. The Native Mexicans call her a prostitute because she gets the influence from America for a long time. Cervantes thinks isn’t her fault, is her ancestor’s fault because she can’t control that. So that’s why I think immigrants should keep their “old language” alive. If we learn English and don’t know our own language, we won’t be able to communicate with our cousin. Even when we came back to our home country, we can’t communicate with other people. I don’t want to feel like I am a stranger in our home.
The article Mother Tongue, by Amy Tan is a personal look into how language, and the dialects of that language, can affect a person 's life. It 's a look into how the people inside the cultural circles who use dialect derivatives of a major language are treated by people who exist outside of those cultural circles. It shows us how society treats a person using a "broken" or "limited" dialect, and how society 's treatment of these people can also affect the children who grow up using these "broken" dialects. Tan wrote this article try and convey to the reader that English is a colorful, and ever-changing language that has many dialects. Tan makes the point, several times throughout the article, that society judges you based on the type of English that you use. Throughout the article, Tan uses both her mother, herself and society 's treatment of them as evidence to support her idea. The purpose of pointing this out is to show the reader that the language a person uses, whether it be taught to them in school or by a parent at home, isn 't indicative of a person 's intelligence or value, and they shouldn 't be judged as less for using it.