“Me talk pretty one day” by David Sedaris
”Understanding doesn’t mean that you can suddenly speak the language. Far from it. It’s a small step, nothing more, yet its rewards are intoxicating and deceptive.”
In this story, the narrator tells that it’s not about speaking the language, it’s about understanding it. And if you want to speak the language you need to take it slow, or else you won’t learn it. It’s about hard work and dedication.
The theme of the text is learning a foreign language, and the perspective is from the forty-year old person who is also in the class, learning French. He writes about his experiences on learning French.
The forty-year old person who’s in the story is learning to speak French in Paris, and has a teacher who is cruel to the ones who can’t speak French. For example if a girl in the class doesn’t know the exact correct words or verbs, she gets held down and the teacher is trying to get them down in shame.
The teacher also poked a girl in her eye with a fresh sharpened pencil and the teacher didn’t spend much time apologizing.
The teacher seems cold, harsh and angry with the student and seems like she doesn’t really care if they learn something. She acts like this so they feel shameful of even trying to learn French. She makes them all equal even though they all have differences. Even though she is like this, she makes the narrator learn more French than he could ever imagine.
The narrator speaks in a very funny and ironic language, because he talks about irrelevant stuff like, a stegosaurus eating a ham sandwich.
The class didn’t speak fluent English, and some of them are saying sentences like: “sometimes me cry alone in night… that be common for I, also, but me more strong, you.”
The narrator didn’t feel intimidated by the people in the class, because he knew that he wasn’t the only one.
He was one of the older ones in his class, and he worked hard to learn French, and he was awarded for his hard work, he could understand every word of it. His message with the text is that it doesn’t matter who you are, or how old you are when you go back to school to learn something, because you can achieve everything you put in front of you, as long as you put hard work in it.
David’s tone in this text is humorous. He uses humorous words, and that makes it more ironic to read. He uses irrelevant words like: “Front teeth like tombstones”, and expressions like: “rabbity mouth.”
He also uses nonsense words such as: “apzkiubjxow” or “meimslsxp.” And he says these words because he doesn’t understand some of the words the teacher is saying.
He describes the persons in the story, in a funny way. This is what he sees them like.
If he used normal words and correct use of words, the story would be a whole different story, and it wouldn’t be as ironic.