Students: Hidalgo Sofia, Nunnini Sofia

The Influence of the Mother Tongue

In her essay "Mother-tongue", Amy Tan talks about how her English changes
according to the context and the people she's with. She mainly focused on her
mother's English and the challenges she faces as an Asian living in America.
Throughout her life, Amy always felt quite aware and limited by her mother's
English since it could be described as "broken", and even though she
understood the language perfectly, her "imperfect" use of it often caused her
to be dismissed or even mistreated by natives who sometimes pretended they
did not understand or even hear her. Furthermore, she emphasizes the
challenges that Asian students face because of people's prejudices about their
English skills and the preconceived notion that Asian people are better at
exact sciences. She goes on to reveal that she went against these
expectations and became a writer who combines the English she learnt in
school and the one she heard and spoke at home to create pieces of writing
that could still convey a lot while being easy to read.

As non native English speakers learning the language, we can relate to Amy
because in some classes we are taught a very strict structure, which is
undoubtedly important but it limits our use of English and how we express
ourselves. When learning a language, it is also crucial to understand how
people use it in real life because if we base our communication on textbook
examples, we may sound unnatural to native speakers even though we
understand the language perfectly. To be able to have a successful
communication, we should learn how different people from different
backgrounds use the language in real situations, so we could understand not
only scholars but also regular natives and people from different ethnicities.
Excellent point!!!

In our cultural context we encounter a lot of people that face the same
challenges as Amy's mother because their use of Spanish can also be
described as broken or fragmented. These people often lack the resources or
access to standard education which jeopardizes the way they express
themselves. People tend to patronize them, assuming they are less intelligent
or even inferior, which leads them to and mistreat these people. That i's why, it
is important to understand that even though these people may not express
themselves perfectly, that does not mean that they do not have a good
understanding of the language.

Amy's essay has helped us realize how sometimes we assume things about
people just because of the way they talk, instead of trying to understand that
they come from a different background than us. Therefore, if we interact with
someone whose language is considered to be "broken", we must not be
judgmental, and try to understand their point without focusing too much on
grammatical or pronunciation mistakes.

All in all, we can say that language is quite complex and how we use it to
communicate with other people is tightly related to our social and familial
context. Moreover, even though language has its rules, in the real world, there
are many ways of using it and expressing our thoughts and ideas and we
should have an open mind when interacting with different people.

Well done!
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