I would like to put all of my opinions together that I got after reading Amy Tan “Mother Tongue” and watching Jamila Lyiscott “3 Ways to Speak English” and Noel Quiñones “8 Confessions of My Tongue”. These three things are all talking about the language speaking experience as immigrants. And I sympathize that. Me as immigrant from China, an Asian American as who the article and videos mentions, I do speak the “broken English”. It doesn’t means that I never ever study English, but more is about the English grammar and the amounts of vocabulary list in their inner mind. I fully understood that in Amy Tan “Mother Tongue”, the thought of author’s mom to speak English. Why her mom speaks like that is not because the perception, but because it was limited, by the grammar and vocabulary just like what I mentioned above. Plus, for those children who were born in USA but were born from immigrant family, they have to speak two languages as bilingual or even over two as linguist. If they don’t achieve this, they’ll face bias like “you don’t even speak your mother language” or “you don’t belong to USA because you are immigrant, you don’t belong to your home country because you don’t speak its standard language, and you don’t belong to anywhere”… etc.
I mean, do we as bilingual or linguist have to listen to those comments or criticisms that doesn’t even sound respectful and face the bias of “you don’t belong to anywhere” and eventually accept the negative energies that all these force us to burden? No! No matter what language we are speaking as first mother language and no matter what language we are learning, they all need practice. Speaking “broken English” need to practice the grammar and accumulate more words on one list in mind. Not good to speak mother language need to practice the interest and perception to it and spend time to bone it as the first time to speak language since born.
As for me, I even’t speak “broken English” sometimes. Because my brain cannot react so rapidly when some talking directly happen within one second. It’s more like I need time to switch the language module of my mind between my mother language Chinese and English. I need to organize words in my brain and translate them and finally put them into English grammatical sentences, it always takes time, or need few seconds to make reaction. At the end, I wanna advocate that, show more respects to language learners and multiple language speakers, because they overuse their brain and always need time to activate it. Thank you!
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