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Sa Aking mga Kabata - Pilipino Express

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Something Fishy About Rizal Poem • Part 2 • Paul Morrow<br />

Rizal’s first teacher was his mother<br />

who taught him to read, but it seems<br />

that the emphasis was on Spanish, not<br />

Tagalog. According to his diaries,<br />

written when he was a student in<br />

Manila in the late 1870s, Rizal’s earliest<br />

memory of reading was when he was<br />

so young that it was “still difficult for<br />

[him] to climb up on a chair.” 17 This is<br />

the famous anecdote in which Rizal’s<br />

mother reads him the story of the<br />

moths and the flame, interpreting from<br />

Spanish to Tagalog. However, one<br />

detail in this diary entry that is often<br />

overlooked is that the occasion of this<br />

storytelling – Rizal’s earliest memory<br />

of reading – was actually a Spanish<br />

lesson. Young Jose was reading aloud<br />

for his mother from a Spanish book for<br />

children, Amigo de los Niños, but he was<br />

reading poorly, so she took the book<br />

and began to demonstrate how to read<br />

it properly. When she noticed that Jose was not paying<br />

attention, she stopped the lesson and began to read the story of<br />

the moths and the flame.<br />

Rizal’s early diaries also mentioned that before he entered<br />

school he received some tutoring in Latin from a former<br />

classmate of his father, but the man died suddenly, five months<br />

into the lessons. 18<br />

11<br />

Rizal at age 11 in 1872,<br />

the same year he said his<br />

imagination was awakened<br />

to avenge victims of<br />

injustice

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