Analysis Of Mother Tongue By Amy Tan

In the work of Amy Tan’s “Mother’s Tongue” she provides a look into how she adapted her language to assimilate into American culture. She made changes to her language because her mother heavily relied on her for translation. She was the voice of her mother, relaying information in standard English to

On one side, Amy Tan “Mother Tongue” shows how Amy Opens doors for her mother. One example of this is when Amy says “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." My husband was with us as well, and he didn't notice any switch in my English. And then I realized why. It's because over the twenty years we've been together, I've often used that same kind of English with him, and sometimes he even uses it with me. It has become our language of intimacy, a different sort of English that relates to family talk, the language I grew up with ” (Tan 363). This opens a door for her mother by being in and understand a conversation that she is not normally involved in. This is as simple as Amy talking to her mom in her mother’s language. This is similar to an adult explaining something to a child in the in

In “Mother Tongue,” Amy Tan an American writer, shares her experience growing up with the family where no one speaks perfect English, and how it affected her education and her life. As the second generation of Chinese immigrants, Tan faces more problems than her peers do. Her mother, who speaks limited English needs Tan to be her “Translator” to communicate with the native English speakers. Tan states, “I was ashamed of her English” (2). Her mother is like a burden to her, at least in Tan’s early years. But the cultural conflict she becomes the theme of her writing and it is under this situation she wrote many novels and essays including “Mother Tongue.”

Amy Tan’s literacy narrative “Mother Tongue” is about the different dialects of English, she is familiar with. She explains that her intelligence is judged by the way she speaks. Amy Tan, explains memories from her life where she encounters many forms of English. Her mother, a Chinese immigrant spoke “broken English.” She describes her mother as someone who was able to understand English, well the mother claims that she understands everything, but when it came to speaking, she spoke without the correct grammar. Due to her mothers broken English, Amy Tan has adapted to the type of English her mother speaks, their own type of English language. Tan feels as if the English she is speaking with it outside world is more complex than the English she

3. In paragraphs 10 through 13, Tan juxtaposes her mother’s English with her own. The point these quoted passages make is to show how different was her mother’s English from her English.

Along with strong ethos appeals, Tan also effectively makes use of logos. Tan has mentions her mom “reads the Forbes report, listens to Wall Street Week, converses daily with her stockbroker, reads all of Shirley MacLaine 's books with ease-all kinds of things I can 't begin to understand” (Zapico, 30). It is reasonable to think someone who reads the Forbes report is intelligent or at least knowledgeable. However, the truth is this reader of the Forbes report is a “broken English” speaker. She continues “Yet some of my friends tell me they understand 50 percent of what my mother says. Some say they understand 80 to 90 percent. Some say they understand none of it, as if she were speaking pure Chinese” (Zapico, 30). This use of statistics gives her audiences an inside look into her world and provides evidence that she really knows what she is trying to convince. The mother in the essay represents for the Asian American community as first-generation. Tan evokes an image in the American readers’ mind that first-generation Asian Americans are much more intelligent than what they can convey through words. For this reason, they deserve to be treated the same as others. Although Tan doesn’t focus on using much logos in this essay, all her arguments are logical, and perhaps the audience are able to be

In Mother Tongue, Amy Tan talks about how language influenced her life while growing up. Through pathos she explains to her audience how her experiences with her mother and the Chinese language she came to realize who she wanted to be and how she wanted to write.

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.

The essays, "Mother Tongue" by Amy Tan and "Public and Private Language" by Richard Rodriguez are recollections of both of the author’s personal encounters and difficulties with the gap that was created between their families by differences in languages. These two writers grew up with bilingual families, in which English was not the primary language. Consequently, they had a hard time accepting and understanding the issues surrounding the different languages they spoke with their families at home, and within society. Because of this, the gap between their public and private languages that had been created through the introduction of a second language slowly grew larger, and eventually impacted their relationships with their family and caused them to view them in a different light. In their writing, Both Tan and Rodriguez reflect on their personal experiences and memories and illuminate the effects that a private language can have on various aspects of life.

In Amy Tan’s narrative, “Mothers Tongue”, Tan speaks about the unique dialect that she and her mother share. Only she could understand and conversations with her mother and understand every word she is saying. Tan writes about how she grew up with the variations of English; the perfect English that she spoke to the public, and the broken English she used with her mother. Tan writes that from a young age she was very embarrassed by the limited knowledge of English and how that “… reflected the quality of what she had to say.” (Tan, pg. 635) Tan reflects that with her mother’s limitations, she had to talk on her mother’s behalf just to have others hear what her mother had to say, Amy recalls a time where she was called to basically interpret

First of all, Amy Tan uses ethos to present the idea that social expectations must not negatively influence one's perception. She makes her argument by using rhetorical devices such as, “I wanted to capture what language ability tests could never reveal: her intent, her passion, her imagery, the rhythms of her speech and the nature of her thoughts”. She felt that standardized tests could not accurately determine a person’s intelligence. Amy Tan states how people have different ways of thinking and different types of intelligence. Therefore, it really is kind of unfair, for lack of a better term. Tan recalls all the English that she grew up with her mom, and what she was taught affected her life. Throughout the story, she describes her relationship with her mother, who speaks “broken” English, and how her perception of language has changed due to her mother. She also successfully manages to explain that language barriers in the U.S have limited amounts of success for non-English speaking residents. Because her "mother tongue" is the English she uses while she is in her first world, her

In Amy Tan’s essay “Mother Tongue”, Tan discusses how the way her bilingual mother speaks negatively affects how people perceive her intellect. Despite the fact that Tan’s mother is actually very intelligent and understands more than many people expect her to, she often is ignored and belittled because of how she speaks. Tan feels that those who ignore and belittle her mom are oblivious to the beauty, complexity, and richness of her mother’s speech. In Tan’s essay “Mother Tongue”, Tan shows that the belief that standard English is inherently better than other forms of English is flawed by questioning the prominence of proper English and sharing how rich and beautiful her mother’s English can be.

At hoe, Amy Tan maintained a loving relationship with her mother. There, they were able to speak to each other the same way and understand each other perfectly. It was only outside the home that communication became a problem. She recalls how people disrespected her mother in department stores, restaurants and other places. Her mother, on a daily basis, received a constant condescending attitude from people. Tan became very uncomfortable with such attitudes. When her mother is disrespected or treated unfairly, Tan would simply “sit there red-faced and quiet”. She never felt angry toward her mother, like Khang did. However, she did feel that her mother’s informal English limited her perception of her.

In their articles, Chang Rae-Lee and Amy Tan establish a profound ethos by utilizing examples of the effects their mother-daughter/mother-son relationships have had on their language and writing. Lee’s "Mute in an English-Only World" illustrates his maturity as a writer due to his mother’s influence on growth in respect. Tan, in "Mother Tongue," explains how her mother changed her writing by first changing her conception of language. In any situation, the ethos a writer brings to an argument is crucial to the success in connecting with the audience; naturally a writer wants to present himself/herself as reliable and credible (Lunsford 308). Lee and Tan, both of stereotypical immigrant background, use their

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