don't judge//

Hey there, welcome to my 3^rd blog post in Lang and Lit. For this blog post, I will be stating my personal opinion about certain topics which Amy Tan has mentioned in her text, “Mother Tongue”. Throughout the text, Amy has mentioned how her mom struggles speaking in English which is why people often don’t take her seriously or be rude to her. People often judge those whose level of fluency in English low. Some people may base one’s intelligence with how they speak English which I think is amiss.

It is often that people make mistakes when they speak English and sometimes, it’s not really a big of a deal to others. But when it comes to foreign English speakers, even a bit of grammatical mistake, some Native English speakers would make iniquitous judgements out of it. I am not saying that all Native English speakers are like that but I have had lots of experiences with how some treat those foreign English speakers rudely.

I find it unnecessary for people to poke fun at those who couldn’t speak English fluently. I know some people who are really good at speaking in English when you talk to them but when it comes to public speaking, their anxiety and nervousness would make them stutter and make grammatical errors. So basically, that doesn’t define their fluency in English. Plus, I don’t think that it’s fair to call some people’s way of speaking in English “broken” or “fractured”. It’s not morally right to say that one’s way of speaking is “broken”. If we see a person struggling to speak in English, what’s best is we should help the person because it wouldn’t make us any better if we just make fun of them. People who are acting rude to those people does not do any good to themselves or others. We should all learn how to stop feeding our own egos.

Another thing mentioned by the author is her language of intimacy with her mom and husband. I find it interesting how she calls her way of communicating to them that. I think it is the language only her and her mom and husband understands which is why she considers it as intimate. There may be some grammatical errors with their way of speaking but what matters to Amy is how they understand each other.

Personally, I can say that I also have a language of intimacy with my mom. People who would hear us talking to each other might think that we talk nonsense because I grew up talking to my mom in Taglish which is a mix of the Tagalog and English language. To be honest, my mom speaks better English than I do because she has worked in a call center company which helped her improve her vocabulary in English. I don’t get intimidated by that cause if it wasn’t because of her great English skills, I wouldn’t be able to speak English well. Anyways, I don’t care what people think of how we talk to each other because our way of speaking is between me and mom.

So yeah, I guess what I can say is we all should stop discriminating and judging those who can’t speak English fluently. We all should actually look up to those people because despite their struggle with speaking the language, they still try their best to make us understand what they are trying to say. Plus, even Native English speakers makes mistakes. So isn’t it unfair to judge the non-native English speaker’s mistakes despite the fact that English is just their second language? 

"English is just a language, not a knowledge."