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Amy Tan Mother Tongue Analysis

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My Experience As a kid, I never thought I would end up learning to speak English nor go to a foreign country for college. During my first semester of college, I read Amy Tan’s essay “Mother Tongue” which I found to be such a compelling essay. I am not much of an avid reader, but this specific essay had a bond that specified what my life has been for the previous seven years. In her essay she writes about her experience with English as a second language and It’s a lot like mine. I would like to refer her mother to me in this essay.
For example, when Amy Tan wrote of how she would translate her mother's English to others, because she wasn't able to express herself to others through English. The response her mother would received was not to be taken serious. This I have experienced quite a lot when I would go to stores and ask for help. With the little English I knew at the time, I would get to stores and ask for a specific item. The workers at that store would take me to the aisle and show me the variety of items they had, but not the one I was searching for. Sometimes my family and I will go out to eat, we would order just like anybody and try to enjoy our meals. Sometimes an order will come out wrong and we couldn’t really explain the problem, so we would just eat it. …show more content…

As a kid, it was a big challenge to deal with because of the language barrier. Communicating was tough, I learned more sign language than English in the process. Another major issue I experience was the pronunciation of the English vocabulary. Naturally, as a non-native speaker, I have a slight accent. It's been seven years and still have an accent, it has its pro’s and con’s depending on the situation. What I notice as time passed was that people who spoke Spanish would understand my accent more than people who only spoke English. I still wonder why that

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