Essay about The Languages Of Embarrassment

Submitted By tkuo1
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Pages: 4

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Tiffany Kuo
Prof. Click
Eng 100
18 Feb 2014
The Languages of Embarrassment
In America, a lot of people learn English as their second language. Richard Rodriguez is the author of “Public and Private Language”, and he was raised in a working­class Mexican immigrant family. Certainly, the immigrants come from different countries, and sometimes they do not feel comfortable speaking their native language in public since people naturally want to speak the language that most people will understand. Likewise, they like to speak their native language to their friends or family because they would feel closer to each other. Most of the time, immigrants like me would worry about how people think when we speak English; we are afraid because English and American culture are very strange to us. Nonetheless, people should never feel embarrassed to speak their languages because everyone should be proud of their cultures and who they are.
The immigrants often do not feel confident with a new language. In “Public and Private
Language” Rodriguez points out that he felt “dazed, diffident, afraid” (Rodriguez 169) when he had to speak English in public. Rodriguez did not feel he had the rights to use English as his language because he did not know how to speak it. He was a new American citizen; English was strange to him because he only knew how to speak Spanish. Accordingly, when he went to school, he did not want to answer questions in class because he was afraid that people were going to judge him. At home, his family tried to practice their English; they felt uncomfortable

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and weird when they do not speak Spanish to each other. Therefore Rodriguez admits, “a language foreign to us, so we felt drawn as strangers to it.” (Rodriguez 170). Language is a very amazing thing because when we are using a foreign language, we will have different sounds, tones, and meanings. There will always be a distance between different languages.
From my personal experiences, I can understand how Rodriguez felt. I came to America when I was fourteen years old, and I did not know how to speak English at all. At the same time
I was scared, stressful, helpless, and afraid that my teacher would call on me to answer questions.
It was the worst feeling ever because even though I knew the answers, I did not know how to say them in English. Just like how Rodriguez points out, “In Spanish, he [his father] expressed ideas and feelings he rarely revealed in English” (Rodriguez 173). Rodriguez knows that his father is a very talkative and outgoing person, but he is not an outgoing person when he speaks English because his English is not fluent. I have this same situation with Rodriguez’s father because I felt ashamed of myself when people laughed at my horrible English, so I would rather not express my ideas to the public. In this condition, it is really hard for immigrants like me and Rodriguez’s father to have any confidence to speak