The main idea of Amy Tan’s “Mother Tongue” emphasizes the barriers that flawed English can present, but the beauty and passion that type of English has. She criticizes her mother’s English and the problems it caused her on standardized tests, but in the end, appreciates the richness it has contributed to her writing. 2. Tan’s tone varies through her piece, beginning as critical, then transitioning to sympathy, and finally appreciation. While giving a talk about the book she wrote, Tan realizes that her way of speaking does not match the way she speaks at home, and, “is carefully wrought with grammatical phrases, burdened . . . with nominalized forms, past perfect tenses, conditional phrases, all the forms of standard English that I had learned