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David Sedaris Me Talk Pretty One Day

Decent Essays

It is not easy to learn a foreign language. It is definitely one of the hardest and challenging thing to do, especially when you are a bit older. Therefore, it is extremely important to be taught the language in a safe environment and with a good teacher. And a teacher has to think about the way they interact with student, if not they can end up scaring them rather than helping them.
It however wasn’t what David Sedaris experiences when he travelled to France to learn the language. In the essay “Me Talk Pretty One Day” he reflects on the struggles he had while he was learning French and his journey, and the essay was written by David Sedaris, 2005.

The tones David Sedaris has used through this essay is rather informal, casual, humorous, …show more content…

From the very beginning it is very clear that David Sedaris’s teacher isn’t an ordinary teacher “The teacher marched in, deeply tanned from recent vacation, and proceeded to rattle off a series of administrative announcements” (p1l16). The teacher starts out by belittle everyone that speaks in the classroom, she does it to set a standard for how the year has to be. David Sedaris describes it as being “in the presence of an animal, something completely unpredictable.” (p.2l.80). The writer then goes on to talking about the teacher’s methods of teaching and that involves in picking and belittling the students and making fun of them. Besides, she doesn’t allow the student to speak anything besides French which restrictions those students who doesn’t have a big vocabulary. Her tough and unresponsive methods of teaching make the students very scared and insecure about speaking in her classroom and they feel like they are in a warzone. “We soon learned to dodge chalk and to cover our heads and stomachs whenever she approached us with a question” (p.2 l. 84). It made the writer more afraid and insecure about speaking the language and not just in the classroom, but also in public. The main reason he moved to France was to learn the language by being forced to speak it in public. However, he wasn’t confident speaking to people anymore “Stopping for a coffee, asking directions, depositing money in my bank account: these things where out of the question, as they involved having to speak” (p.3 l.99-100). It is so sad, because he travelled all the way to Europe to be too scared to speak to people. The fear was a result from his horrible teacher, because it had not always been this way. Since attending the French course in New York he didn’t really care about having flawed conversation “Before beginning school, there’d been no shutting me up,

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