Category: Reading Response
Response to “Mother Tongue”
Something that I found interesting in the text “Mother Tongue” by Amy Tan was her relationship and experience with her mother’s “broken” English. Throughout the text, Tan mentions how she had grown up around her mother’s “broken” English and had assimilated it into her own life and was accustomed to it. I had the opposite experience, which is why I found her relationship and experience so interesting. In my family, my father speaks near to “fluent” English while my mother speaks “broken” English. From a young age I’ve always spoken to my father, as well my siblings, in English, and I’ve always spoken Urdu with my mother, but not just any Urdu, I spoke “broken” Urdu. Throughout my life, my mother relates to Tan a lot more than I do. My mother has learned and has been accustomed to my “broken” Urdu rather than me learning her “broken” English.
Sandra Cisnero “Only daughter”
In Sandra Cisnero’s “only daughter” she emphasizes the fact that shes the only female sibling in a family of six male brothers. Throughout her early life all she wanted to do was be recognized by her father and prove to him that she didn’t have to get married in college to be successful. I felt really touched by this reading mainly because she was determined to show her father that she had achieved something great in life that shes proud of. Just because she was the only girl, her father didn’t really seem to give her the same attention as her brothers. But it really touched me at the end of the story when she had recently had one of her stories translated into spanish and had her dad read it, and when he finished it he seemed to be very proud of her and actually wanted more copies for the relatives. This was proof that her father finally gave her some recognition and realized how successful his daughter turned out to be. This sort of gave Cisnero some peace and weight off her shoulders to know that she had achieved the goal of making her father proud.
Unit 1 Assignments Part 1
Unit 1 Assignments Part 1
Annotate “Mother Tongue”
- “I spend a great deal of my time thinking about the power of language — the way it can evoke an emotion, a visual image, a complex idea, or a simple truth.”
Learning to speak in the mother tongue is very important for a child’s overall development. Being fluent in the mother tongue, which is also known as the native language, benefits the child in many ways. It connects him to his culture, ensures better cognitive development, and aids in the learning of other languages.
- “The intersection of memory upon imagination” and “There is an aspect of my fiction that relates to thus-and-thus’–a speech filled with carefully wrought grammatical phrases, burdened, it suddenly seemed to me, with nominalized forms, past perfect tenses, conditional phrases, all the forms of standard English that I had learned in school and through books, the forms of English I did not use at home with my mother.
A child’s first comprehension of the world around him, the learning of concepts and skills, starts with the language that is first taught to him. She uses her own way, which is writing, to make a bridge between these two cultures, because she thinks that language has power that we can’t imagine. Mother language has such an important role in framing our thinking and emotions.
- “The nature of the talk was about my writing, my life, and my book, The Joy Luck Club. The talk was going along well enough, until I remembered one major difference that made the whole talk sound wrong.”
Mother language has a very powerful impact in the formation of the individual. Our first language, the beautiful sounds which one hears and gets familiar with before being born while in the womb, has such an important role in shaping our thoughts and emotions. A child’s psychological and personality development will depend upon what has been conveyed through the mother tongue.
- “Just last week, I was walking down the street with my mother, and I again found myself conscious of the English I was using, the 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.”
Tan is very attached to her mother’s English to the point that she doesn’t want to refer to it as “broken.” To her it symbolizes home because it’s the English she grew up with. She says it provides imagery and emotions that standard, grammatically correct English cannot.
Mother Tongue is about the authors struggles with her linguistic identity, her mother’s “fractured” or “broken” variation of english and the relationship with her mother. At the beginning of the piece we are told about the different types of english she would speak with her mother and with everyone else; we are then told how english wasn’t Amy’s strongest subject and later on we are told about the difficulties her mother experienced because of the way she spoke english and the prejudice she faced.
Tan talks about a few different types of English and in what situations she uses them, but each English form symbolizes something different to her. From my initial experiences and interactions with adults, I began to read words, processing letter-sound relations and acquiring substantial knowledge of the alphabetic system. As I continued to learn, I increasingly consolidated this information into patterns that allow for automaticity and fluency in reading and writing.
In “Mother Tongue” by Tan there are a few details and choice words that she used that paints an image to the reader exactly what she is meaning to explain. One example of such detail is the use of the word “Englishes”. The use of the word here gives me an idea that she is talking about languages altogether but also the breakdown of a certain language and how it is used to communicate. The idea that Englishes could mean not just different languages but also a form of simplistic communication within 1 individual language.
Another example would be how she uses “broken” English to talk to her mother. This shows that even with all the education and reading that her mother had gone through, they still use such a simple and basic form of English to communicate and still communicate their thoughts vividly to each other.
A third example is how time can inevitably change how you talk to someone. In the text she mentions that she uses a phrase she would usually only say to her mother to her husband instead. This shows that her language when talking to her husband is usually formal but throughout time she had developed a simplistic way of talking to him.
Another detail that stood out to me was her mothers imperfect English somehow painting an image on Tan herself giving her the idea that her mother also had imperfect thoughts because she used her broken English to evoke a thought or portray emotion. This strikes me as odd because although her English may limit how she wants to display emotions or thoughts, it doesn’t or shouldn’t cause her to think her thoughts themselves are imperfect.
Tans story relates to me as I was learning Arabic as a child and my mother was not fluent with the English language. This basically put me in a position that closely resembles Tans. My mother would speak to me using simple words and practically broken Arabic so that I would understand her without being confused, even if it meant I wouldn’t fully understand or comprehend what she is wanting to say, and the say would go the other way around, where she spoke broken English to me and I would respond in a similar fashion. My experiences with learning to read and write in both languages was generally a tough situation to be in as I would read, write and speak in English in school but it would be practically the opposite at home. This made me choose one language over another and ultimately weakening my second language heavily. One thing that I don’t relate with from the text is Tans approach of thinking her mothers thoughts were imperfect as she did not portray her thoughts as vividly as she wanted. This was not the case for me as I understood that my mother was just trying to help me learn and make it easy so that I don’t go askew.