To understand the reading, “Mother Tongue” by Amy Tan, I put myself into the author's shoes to see where the author was coming from. Learning a different language is hard to do if you are not familiar with it. People need to understand that no one is going to fluent in any language that they never spoken in before. Have respect for those of different languages. The article's theme of Mother Tongue is seeing how different people are and that it is okay to be different because everyone needs to experience
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The essays, "Mother Tongue" by Amy Tan and "Private Language, Public Language" by Richard Rodriguez are recollections of both authors’ personal encounters and difficulties with the gap that was created between their family and public languages. These two writers grew up in immigrant families, in which English was not their primary language. Consequently, they had a hard time accepting and understanding the difference between the two languages they had to speak at home and in the society. Both authors
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Rodriguez, Rodriguez describes the blending of identities in America. Moreover, in “Mother Tongue” by Amy Tan, Tan discusses how English is not a single language but rather a language that is built off of many languages. Such as Amy’s mother when she speaks English, Amy Tan illustrates her language as “broken” English. Amy Tan explains how she has used multiple Englishes with different type of people. In “Mother Tongue” and “Blaxicans and other reinvented Americans”, both authors Amy Tan and Richard
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In Amy Tan’s “Mother Tongue”, the author explores the implications the English language imposes on its speakers, in particular those who speak a broken English. Tan asserts her findings by discussing her own mother’s speech and how it compares to not only hers but society's. She recognizes that her speech is different from her mother's and notes how she herself often manipulates the english language depending on the audience she is communicating with. While speaking to a literary-based group she
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identify that type of English as either broken or fractured English. In the short story, “Mother Tongue” written by Amy Tan describes that these types of people are stereotyped and are judged by the way they speak. Tan explains that her mother speaks a different type of English, and that she receives judgement and mistreatment by this. Additionally, Tan expresses that she speaks differently to her mother than to other people. The central theme of this short story is that society is judgemental
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Well-known novelist, Amy Tan, describes in her essay, Mother Tongue, how her language changes when talking with different people, as well as her mother’s “broken” English; therefore, Tan delivers her message about her language and identity. Tan’s purpose is to convey the idea that “the language spoken in the family, especially in immigrant families which are more insular, plays a large role in shaping the language of the child” (Zapico, 32). The language spoken in the family is always important to
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In the essay “Mother Tongue” written by Amy Tan, her essay illustrates the language that her mother used to speak with her. At the begging, she noticed the different Englishes that she speaks after many different events. Furthermore, she described her mother language as a broken English, because many people could not understand her mother. In addition, in one of the speeches that she used to do in order to describe her books, she had a moment to think about the English that she is using and felt
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For years, the language barrier has been a stopping force of the world coming together as a whole. Deborah Tannen, “How Male and Female Students Use Language Differently” and Amy Tan, “Mother Tongue” both talk about language barriers that are present in society. Today’s society proposes many language barriers. Of these language barriers, two prominent illustrations would be male and female versus immigrant and citizen barriers. Male and female differ in the way they communicate by slang usage and
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Summarizing and Responding: Amy Tan’s “Mother Tongue” Amy Tan, a writer, explains the power of the language and the kinds of English she uses in her essay “Mother Tongue”. Tan is a writer fluent in English who grew up in a family of immigrants; her mother is Chinese. In one of her speeches, using the formal English. When she sees that his mother was sitting among people whose she has never used the professional English Tan realized that she uses two kinds in her life: the professional, for work;
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interpret the true meaning in a piece. In general, tones set the mood for poetry. Analyzing Czelaws Milosz’s “My Faithful Mother Tongue” and James Arlington’s wright is “Lying in A Hammock”, we discover that one of the similarities between both poems is that, both deal with voice and identity. Despite this, each piece has a different tone. In Czeslaw Milosz “My faithful Mother tongue”, we are able to imagine and explore the speaker’s world in the 1983, being an immigrant on exile in postwar United
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Tino Alvarez Diverse Identities Professor Chuck Hill 3/9/15 Mother Tongue The reading Mother Tongue was a very interesting story of a writer Amy Tan and her experiences as a young professional getting in the field of short story writing. She begins by giving a little personal story on how she became to love the English language and why she wanted to pursue what she might believe be her weakest subject. Amy loves the power language and how it can evoke emotion, visual image
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In Amy Tan's article "Mother Tongue," some of the main points were how people are treated who have broken English, the language barriers, and limited resources and how to overcome such obstacles. It also deals with the emotions associated with Amy Tan, as a young child having to pretend to be her mother, just because her mother was not being taken seriously. Tan's article reminds me of how it feels to learn another language, such as Russian for myself. While I began learning Russian, I have dealt
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Mother Tongue Amy Tan is an American writer and author of many writings focusing on mother-daughter relationships and Chinese American experiences. She is best known for her novel “The Joy Luck Club,” which describes the painful relationship between four Chinese American daughters and their mothers. Mostly all of her writings include some of her personal stories between her and her mother on day to day experiences. In the novel “Mother Tongue” Amy decides to share her personal background and the
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Mother Tongue by Amy Tan Amy Tan's Mother Tongue is highlighting the difference in the many forms of a language used, not just by different individuals, but also by the same person when speaking to a different audience. I believe she is validating the individual usage of a language on the basis of it's expression and intent, not merely on grammatical correctness or grasp of vocabulary. If language is expressing properly to the intended audience, it is not to be considered lesser even if it is what
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Be proud of your mother tongue How do you pronounce the word ‘garage’? I bet you all think you do, especially if you are reading this on the other side of the pond, where this article is published and read by my country people. But wait till you have to speak perfect English all day every day to a bunch of teenagers who think every mispronunciation you make necessitates a burst of mirth. After years of dealing with being told that when I say ‘thought’ it sounds like ‘taught’, I devised a way of
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The essay “Mother Tongue” by Amy Tan. The author tells us how the power of language has played a major role in her life. Tan describes her observation and thoughts about the use of the English language and the perceptions of others regarding to non-English speakers. She describes the pain and shame she felt while observing the negative reactions her mother would receive from others because her “broken” English was different from everyone else. Therefore, she would get ridiculed, people did not take
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most popular problems in communities, and people could not do anything except face with it. According to “Mother Tongue” by Amy Tan and “Myth of the Latin Women” by Judit Ortiz Cofer, the authors illustrate how American evaluate people who are from different cultures, how discrimination affects to their life, and how people find solutions to solve their problems. In the article “Mother Tongue”, Amy Tan emphasizes that people have various ways to communicate with the others. The authors is a Chinese
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ENG 100 Assign. 03 Amy Tan: Mother Tongue (p397-p402) When I moved to Seychelles in 2006 to work for the local government there, my biggest concern was that my knowledge of the English language would not be adequate to be a successful teacher. When it came to the subject itself I felt confident enough I had the necessary skills. I had been teaching science for 6 years and was familiar with the program that I was going to instruct. Feeling a bit scared I entered the classroom the first day of the
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I believe the author of “Mother Tongue” makes a clear and concise argument about how some Asian-Americans English can disrupt the flow of expressing themselves when conducting casual conversations and normal everyday business transactions with the limited English they possess. This admission is made by the author when talking about her own mother's “broken” English. The author also pointed out that creative writing programs are much needed in the Asian-American communities (Tan 21-23). With my distinctive
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A Literary Analysis on “Mother Tongue” By Demetria Martinez “His nation chewed him up and spat him out like a pinon shell, and when he emerged from an airplane one late afternoon, I knew I would one day make love with him” (Martinez, 3). And so it starts, the story of a nineteen year old Mexican- American girl named Mary (Maria; as he only chooses to call her), who helps out and eventually falls in love with Jose Luis Alegria, a Salvadoran refugee. Martínez's story of María is told against
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_UNESCO Education Position Paper_ 2003 Current educational decisions makers are faced with a great difficulty when it comes to deciding on languages, schooling and the curriculum. On one hand there are strong educational arguments in favor of mother tongue/first language use for instruction purposes, but on the other hand there is a need for balance between the use of local languages in learning and the access to global languages for communication through education. The educational systems try to
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'Search for my tongue' The poet feels she has lost an important part of herself that she needs to recover to feel herself again. 'lost the first one, the mother tongue, and could not really know the other' The original language is associated with being nurturing, protecting, loving. The second language is seen to be alien. The poet feels it is not possible to fully understand or become completely part of another culture. 'if you lived in a place you had to/speak a foreign tongue' There is a suggestion
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Shapiro role as a “talebearer” goes beyond the want to tell stories, and one of the sides of the boarder she is negotiating in evil tongue. By telling stories she is breathing “life back into the people in her life she has lost.” She seeks to understand those she has lost and thus “digs for their stories” and attempts to “assemble the pieces.” Unable to “leave the stories alone,” and feeling that writing “is “the closest” she “can get” to them she tells and seeks stories. “The pieces of” Shapiro’s
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very successful American writer of many pieces of literature including Mother Tongue and The Joy Luck Club, which was written in the year 1989. Based on Amy Tan’s “Mother Tongue” it is evident that language has an effect on our lives. Language defines the type of person I am generally and it has had an effect on my choices as well as my lifestyle. Language has become my way of seeing life in a different perspective. In “Mother Tongue”, Amy Tan discusses the many ways in which the language that she was
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individuals, this does not mean it is an effortless process as they constantly have to operate in cross culturally informed realities (Panayiotou, 2002). According to Iannaco (2009), translation can challenge early attachment relationships to the mother tongue and lead to unconscious internal conflicts. Different emotional and cognitive experiences are closely linked to words of the language they were acquired in. Therefore, these experiences are stored and more easily accessed from within the language
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The trait that I am observing within my family is tongue rolling. The trait can be viewed as being able to roll your tongue or not being able too. Being able to roll your tongue is classified as an autosomal dominant trait and not being able to roll your tongue is an autosomal recessive trait. Within the population “between 65 and 81 percent of people on earth have this strange and seemingly arbitrary talent”(Hullinger, 2015). I 1 is Michael Greene and he is my paternal grandfather. He is 78
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Sara Jones 28 March 2011 Professor Scott Aclt 052 Getting through the English Language: My Response Essay to Mother Tongue The fiction essay “Mother Tongue” by Amy Tan is just one of her short stories that were written by this expressive writer. This reading selection explains the life of the author from a young child until now as an accomplished Chinese-American writer. Even though there are different nationalities of immigrants in America. It shows that we all have the same problems, which
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Thuy Tran Ms. Frey – Writing 115 Reader Response 5 October 27, 2009 Mother Tongue As a writer, the language is the creative tool, the way they are using the language is very necessary for their job. In the essay “Mother Tongue,” Amy Tan tells about how language influenced her life while growing up. As she was wondering in her essay, “Why are there few Asian Americans enrolled in creative writing programs? Why do so many Chinese students go into engineering?” (165). I try to figure out the answer
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“Mother’s Tongue” by Amy Tan, Tan believes we all speak in different tongues, languages, and based on our limitations in english, effects the way we are judged in society. Born in a Chinese culture, Tan has grown up adapting and learning how to speak in different languages. She begins to recognize experiences in her life that exposes the different types of tongue, or as she puts it “englishes”, that she herself uses. She opens the idea by first realizes her english she uses publicly when her mother attends
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Immigrants have a significant impact on America. The United States is referred to as a “melting pot” because there are so many different cultures and backgrounds that came into our country. Immigrants have helped shape American culture/identity by implementing their traditions and bringing awareness to society. In the article “Blaxicans and Other Reinvented Americans” by Richard Rodriguez illustrates the idea that no matter your background, you choose who to be. Rodriguez states, “As an American
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