...kind” by Amy Tan the mother whom is a Chinese immigrant wishes that her first generation American daughter accomplish everything she couldn’t and even wishes that her daughter becomes a prodigy. This hope to acquire the American dream bring tension in the mother and daughter relationship and she in between these two kind of dreams her mothers dream for her and her own dreams. Also, this writing emphasizes the relationship of an immigrant mother and her Chinese American daughter and the tension cause of the American culture that clashes with mother Chinese culture and leads into miscommunication. Also, what might seem like the mother want...
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...Mother Tongue By Amy Tan By Jian C. Chen...
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...Mother Tongue, by Amy Tan I am not a scholar of English or literature. I cannot give you much more than personal opinions on the English language and its variations in this country or others. I am a writer. And by that definition, I am someone who has always loved language. I am fascinated by language in daily life. 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. Language is the tool of my trade. And I use them all -- all the Englishes I grew up with. Recently, I was made keenly aware of the different Englishes I do use. I was giving a talk to a large group of people, the same talk I had already given to half a dozen other groups. 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. My mother was in the room. And it was perhaps the first time she had heard me give a lengthy speech, using the kind of English I have never used with her. I was saying things like, "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...
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...Huang Xu ESL 33B 2/3/2015 My Experience of English Learning As leaning English for almost fifteen years, I have to say I had a lot of experience of learning this language. Yes, I studied English for fifteens, it’s been a long time, but I still can’t speak English fluently. Honestly I don’t think my English is close to “fluently”, I think my English still can describe as “broken” or “fractured”, just like Amy Tan’s mother. The good news is I can feel my improvement, and maybe in years, my English would no longer be “broken”. Any way, as learning English for fifteen years, I always have some interesting things to share. There’s too much to talk about, like my favorite teacher, or the worst teacher I’ve ever met, or the experiences I went through when I first come to America. But because Amy Tan and Elizabeth Wong’s stories, I’d like to share the story about my first English teacher Mrs. Wu and my mother. So let me talk about Mrs. Wu first. I met her in the first year I went to elementary school. She is not the English teacher in school, and actually she was not the real first English teacher I met, but she made me interested in English. We already started to study English in grade one. However my parents thought the English that I learn in elementary school was too basic, and they thought English will be very useful. So they find me an English class outside the school, I met Mrs. Wu there. I didn’t want to have the class at first. I have no wish to learn a foreign language...
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...ESSAY Mother Tongue Don't judge a book by its cover or someone's intelligence by her English. By Amy Tan • Art by Gabe Leonard I am not a scholar of English or literature. I cannot give you much more than personal opinions on the English language and its variations in this country or others. I am a writer. And by that definition, I am someone who has always loved language. I am fascinated by language in daily life. 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. Language is the tool of my trade. And 1 use them all—all the Englishes 1 grew up with. Recently, I was made keenly aware of the different Englishes I do use. I was giving a talk to a large group of people, the same talk I had already given to half a dozen other groups. The talk was about my writing, my life, and my book The Joy Luck Club, and it was going along well enough, until I remembered one major difference that made the whole talk sound wrong. My mother was in the room. And it was perhaps the first time she had heard me give a lengthy speech, using the kind of English I have never used with her. I was saying things like "the intersection of memory and 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, forms...
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...learning English is like that I went from heaven to hell. Although I was so ashamed and felt tremendous pressure to speak English, I must find how to solve all problems of my family. Using my “broken” English is difficult for me to assist my mother, so I am eager to improve my English and teach my mother to learn English to solve her problem by herself in life. According to “Mother Tongue” by Amy Tan, Her parents are Chinese and speak “limited” English. When Amy Tan was fifteen, she used to feel pressure to be a translator to aid her mother on the phone. Her teacher and classmates think the Asian American student can’t be good at English, yet Amy Tan challenges against...
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...my pink backpack on a hook. My parents smiled down at me before leaving me in the increasingly chaotic preschool classroom. Throughout my first day, I heard an onslaught of new words. My head spun, why was no one speaking Chinese? Suddenly, there were “shoes” and “crayons” - two terms my mother had only taught me in Chinese. Every object my mother had taught me in Chinese now had a new English word. Education became a balance between Chinese and English. While in school, I was learning the English alphabet with the rest of my class; however, at home, I was learning Chinese numerals from my parents. My multicultural upbringing made understanding the western concepts taught in school while balancing my contrasting teachings at home difficult....
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...skills and reading experiences are both need to sharpen by time. If we did not have time to sit down and read, we must need other people as sources to assist our writing. I was the child who refused to read and “un-educated” child. Boys tent to learn things more physically compare with girls, and I was the kind of child. To sit down and read would be the hardest act for me. My mother was an elementary school teacher. She retired several years ago, and she known very well about how a young child should be learning. Which means I had different education than other kids. While other students were suffering by their parents’ pressure on their grades, I was...
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...Presentation Outline The Joy Luck Club: Culture Clash and Identities I/ Introduction to The Joy Luck Club * About 4 mother-daughter (Lindo - Waverly, Ying Ying - Lena, An mei - Rose, Suyuan - June) duos living in America * 4 mothers were immigrants from China with tragic past * 4 daughters are American born and raised * A movie with many layers of intercultural and intergenerational communication (miscommunication) between mothers and daughters, as well as the daughters’ struggle with their cultural identities II/ Relevant literature and intercultural communication term * High context/ Low context Cultures * Collectivism / Individualism * Cultural Identity III/ Language barriers Even though the mothers speak understandable English, there are differences between the mothers’ English (alternative version of English with different accents and dialects) and the daughters’ English (American Standard English) Analysis: Analyses scenes where the differences are prominent Ex: [The title of the movie] The word “Joy Luck” does not exist in English. It is a poor, fractures version of English [Clip 01: The opening sequence (family/ friend gatherings)] Even though they are both speaking English, when spoken in groups (of mothers and of daughters), the languages used in each group seem different => Analyze differences in grammars, vocabulary and accents IV/ Communication style * High/Low Context China (high context) vs US (high context) ...
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...Singapore Singapore, a country with mixed nationalities and mixed cultures, attracts numerous culture experts and enthusiasts to study on it. Here in this article, the writers would like to discuss Singapore and introduce Singapore to you from the aspects of the general knowledge of Singapore, the factors that influence the Singaporean culture, Lewis’s theory about cultural categories, Hofstede’s theory about cultural dimensions and Edward’s theory about communication styles. Brief Introduction of Singapore Singapore, officially called the Republic of Singapore, the world's busiest port, though physically small, is an economic giant. It has been Southeast Asia's most modern city for over a century. The name of Singapore comes from Malay language, which can be directly translated into the lion city. Frist of all, Singapore is located in Southeastern Asia, islands between Malaysia and Indonesia. The main island is about 42kilometres from east to west and 23 kilometers from north to south. Singapore’s total land area, including that of the smaller islands, is 697.1 square kilometers. Singapore's strategic location at the southern tip of the Malaysian peninsula has ensured its importance, which is greater than its size might seem to justify. Singapore consists of the island of Singapore and some 63 islets within its territorial waters. Like most of Southeast Asia, Singapore is generally hot and humid. It's warm and humid year round, with the temperature almost never dropping...
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...schools, though such schools and the Ministry of Education offer some scholarships to offset the school fees. Program for Secondary Education Based on results of the PSLE (Primary School Leaving Examination), students are placed in different secondary education tracks or streams: "Special", "Express", "Normal (Academic)", or "Normal (Technical)". Singaporeans are forbidden to attend international schools on the island without Ministry of Education permission. "Special" and "Express" They are the four-year courses leading up to the Singapore-Cambridge GCE "O" Level examination. The difference between these two courses is that in the "Special" stream, students take 'Higher Mother Tongue' (available for Standard Mandarin, Malay and Tamil only) instead of 'Mother Tongue'. A pass in the Higher Mother Tongue 'O' Level Examination constitutes the...
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...Chinese Canadian; An Array of Similar Differences Like Yin and Yang, Taien Ng’s short story, “Shun-Wai”, is a short story of opposites; traditional versus contemporary, eastern versus western, ancestral worship versus religious worship. These contradictions fuel the main narrative and tensions that take place between three generations separated by culture: the Chinese “gwua-mui” narrating this story, her immigrant Christian mother, and her Poh Poh. The mother made everyone else feel uncomfortable by forcing her dogmatic beliefs onto the rest of the family. “Poh Poh hesitated, then put down the soup. My aunt, uncles and cousins looked bewildered. My mother held out her hand to me and told everyone to join hands. She closed her eyes” (Ng, 53)....
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...different mother tongue, or known as the First Language. As for me, my mother tongue was Mandarin. According to my lovely mother, I was born in a Chinese family background, and I was raised speaking Mandarin as my first language. The first few proper words that I was able to utter properly were in Mandarin as well. Thus, I speak Mandarin as my mother tongue. Although my first education institution was the kindergartens, I was not taught to refine and improve my language skills thoroughly. Few years after that, I was enrolled into a Chinese Primary School, St. James Primary, where most of the students there speak Mandarin as well. Starting from Primary level, I’ve been taught to refine my language skills for few more language. From listening, speaking, to reading and also writing, I learnt new words every day in my primary school life. The next language that I learnt in my life was no other than English. English was one of the most important languages in the world as it remains the most spoken and used language regardless of aspects, let it be commercial or general use or even politics. I was taught to speak English since primary level as it was introduced into our learning syllabus. But I was not granted the chance to improve and enhance my language skills until secondary school, where English was used in Mathematics, Science, Biology, Chemistry and Physics syllabus. Moreover, there are more students of different races that enrolled in the school as well, so English became one...
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...found that Japanese exchange students speaking in English to other Japanese have more hesitation, shorter and less communication and negotiation, and lower comfort level. On the other hand, students felt less hesitation, spoke longer, negotiated more, and comfort level were higher when they spoke to nonnative Japanese speakers in English. I personally have experienced feeling somewhat similar to the participants in Takahashi’s study when I was still struggling to learn (acquire) English during my primary education. I felt hesitation, less length conversation and lower comfort level speaking with other Japanese people in English. There are few reasons why I felt like that. First, both interlocutors and I had higher proficiency in Japanese (L1) rather than English (L2), therefore our communication were no that smooth. I felt hesitation and less comfortable for speaking English when the interlocutor had bit higher English...
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...I too have a mother tongue of my own. The text was very relatable in my perspective. Growing up, I've experienced events similar to the ones Tan spoke of. I remember my father being scolded by the owner of a deli across the street that he was stupid, cheap, and that he should go back to China based on his irregular English. I also remember my mother being turned away during parent teacher conference because the teacher simply did not want to bother with my mother's English. My mother and father was not taken seriously just like how Tan's mother was not either. Although I can relate to the author very much so and agree that language should not serve as a barrier to the way we try to understand or be understood by each other, many other people may disagree. Many people do not have thick and choppy accents like Chinese Americans. Not many have the ability to see the image that Tan is trying to convey: the idea of a language that speaks to all also known as her Mother Tongue. Tan also does not consider the fact that many people may not have their own Mother Tongue or that English may have been their first language. Therefore, they may not be able to understand that Mother Tongue is not simply, just another language. It is another language with structure and vocabulary, just like any other language. It seems that Tan originally wanted to gain an audience of all nationalities, but I believe that there will be a more limited amount of readers and more Chinese American readers...
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