Throughout ‘Mother tongue’ by Amy tan her work as an American asian writer focuses on mother-daughter relationship due to the environment she grew up in. In this personal essay Amy tan figures out she had two worlds that she came from one where she knows English and one where she speaks “broken english” the type of english she learned from her mother. It’s not until one day where she was talking to other people about her book “The joy luck club” where she discovered that she speaks two different types of languages and this had impacted not only her writing but her life as well, she speaks broken english to her mother but more complex english to other people.She became ashamed of the way her mother spoke to her in English and it seemed as she was letting society telling tam that her mother’s broken English was an embarrassment and a problem, examples of when Tan’s mother was at the hospital and was treated horribly after being diagnosed with a brain tumor she called the hospital to grasp a better understanding of what was going on as she was extremely worry due to her husband and son passing away from this, due to her heavy accent she was treated horribly the hospital refusing to apologize for the mistake they have done of misplacing her test results . But when Tan called speaking without an accent the hospital representative were extremely apologetic and corrected the error they have made.This allowed tan to think wheat her the way she spoke English would have omitted her opportunities in life. Which did when it came to English class when the question  “Sunset is to nightfall as…” Tan found hard to answer because she couldn’t connect all the possible analogy pairs “the only way i would have gotten that answer right would have been to imagine an associative situation”

Coming from a household where both parents are immigrants that speak Spanish I learn Spanish from a very young age and once I started school I learned English. Now, I wasn’t conscious of the way I spoke English and Spanish. I would speak Spanglish with my parents which is a mix of English and Spanish at once and they wouldn’t be able to fully understand me and I wasn’t able to fully communicate with them because sometimes finding a word in Spanish would be much more difficult than finding a word in english. This frustrated me at times not being able to fully communicate with and understand my parents . Once I started to spend most of my time at school we had to speak english to communicate with others and the problem of expressing myself at home with my parents started to become more difficult. My parents were always scared that i would forget or not speak Spanish anymore so some rules were established . Once i got home Spanish was the only language i was able to speak no english. If i had difficulties with finding a word on the internet or describing the object to my parents would have to the solution, to this day we only speak Spanish in the house just so we don’t forget the language, because as my father says the more languages you know the better. And I am grateful my parent pushed the rule of Spanish in the household because I am now able to help other in the outside world being able to know and understand two languages has truly become a gift.

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