My mother tongue Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words - 1

My mother tongue - Essay Example to learn that one’s native dialect forms a foundation for understanding other languages, but it is also difficult communicate when outside the cultural setting within which it is normally spoken. What’s more, I strongly believe that our cultures, family members, and peers influenced our mother tongue most. My mother tongue is Chinese. Regardless of the language I speak presently, I have spoken Chinese for my whole life. As such, I knew Chinese and English are totally different in some ways. For example, in terms of â€Å"Though†, Chinese grammar said you must have a transition â€Å"but† after words like though/although/even though. However, in English, it doesn’t, it’s wrong if we add â€Å"but† in the sentence. Well, my culture influenced me a lot in that way so that when I first came to United States 3 years ago, I kept making this mistake. Additionally, Chinese culture has one tense, what we did is just simply add a time period before sentence started. For instance, when we want to talk about something in the past, we just add â€Å"in the past† before the whole statement, followed by a comma, making all the succeeding words to be in the past tense. If we need to end that past tense, we simply add another transition word. However, in Engli sh, I came to learn that sentences could not be outlined like that. Instead, we should use past tense when talking about something in the past and use the future tense when something is about in the future. To that effect, my Chinese culture has influenced my grammar so much that I sometimes keep making mistakes when differentiating tenses. These examples show that, even though all languages are supposed to make communication between people easy, they can differ based on the cultural environments where they are used. My family and peers were the primary influence to my mother tongue as I grew up. As far as I remember, People who live in Zhejiang Province like me, find it hard to pronounce the letter â€Å"R† in Chinese