Mother tongue的原文及翻译
Mother Tongue (母语) by Amy Tan
Mother Tongue (母语)
Amy Tan
有错必纠?卡夫芝士粉
[1] 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 u them all—all the Englishes I grew up with.工资证明怎么写
?
?
[2] Recently, I was made keenly aware of the different Englishes I do u. 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 ud with her—a speech filled with carefully constructed grammatical phras, burdened, it suddenly emed to me, with nominalized forms, past perfect tens, conditional phras, all the forms of standard English that I had learned in school and through books, the forms of English I did not u at home with my mother.
[3] Just last week, I was walking down the street with my mother, and I again found mylf conscious of the English I was using, the English I do u with her. We were talking about the price of new and ud furniture and I heard mylf saying this: "Not was
劳动实践个人总结
te money that way." My husband was with us as well, and he didn't notice any switch in my English. And then I realized why. It's becau over the twenty years that we have been together I've often ud the same kind of English with him, and sometimes he even us it with me. It has become our language of intimacy, a different sort of English that relates to family talk, the language I grew up with.
工作调动申请书
?
[4] You should know that my mother's expressive command of English doesn't reflect how much she actually understands[N]. She reads financial reports, listens to Wall Street Week (a TV financial news program), convers daily with her stockbroker, and reads many types of books with ea. Yet some of my friends tell me they only understand 50 percent of what my mother says. Some say they understand 80 to 90 percent. Some say they understand none of it, as if she were speaking pure Chine. But to me, my mother's English is perfectly clear, perfectly natural. It's my mother tongue. Her language, as I hear it, is vivid, direct, full of obrvation and imagery. That was the language that helped shape the way I saw things, expresd things, made n of the world.
?
[5] Lately, I've been giving more thought to the kind of English my mother speaks. Like others, I have described it to other people as "broken" English. But I shrink with pain when I say that. It always bothered me that I can think of no way to describe it other than "broken", as if it were damaged and needed to be fixed, as if it lacked certain wholeness and soundness. I've heard other terms ud, "limited English", for example. But they em just as bad, as if everything is limited, including people's perceptions of the "limited" English speaker.
?
?
[6] I know this for a fact[N], becau when I was growing up, my mother's "limited" English limited my perception of her. I was ashamed of her English. I believed that her English reflected the quality of what she had to say. That is, becau she expresd them
imperfectly her thoughts were imperfect. And I had plenty of empirical evidence to support me: the fact that people in department stores, at banks, and at restaurants did not take her riously, did not give her good rvice, pretended not to understand her, or even acted as if they did not hear her.
?
人工智能专业大学排名[7] My mother has long realized the limitations of her English as well. When I was fifteen, she ud to ask me to call people on the phone to pretend I was she. In this gui, I was forced to ask for information or even complain and yell at people who had been rude to her. One time it was a call to her stockbroker in New York. She had cashed out her small stock portfolio[N] and it just so happened we were going to go to New York the next week, our very first trip outside California. I had to get on the phone and say in an adolescent voice that was not very convincing, "This is Mrs. Tan."
手眼身法步
?
[8] And my mother was standing in the back whispering, "Why he don't nd me check, already two weeks late. So mad he lie to me, losing me money."
?
[9] And then I said in perfect English, "Yes, I'm getting rather concerned. You had agreed to nd the check two weeks ago, but it hasn't arrived."
