David Sedaris Me Talk Pretty One Day Summary

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Multilingual As the world becomes increasingly more global, people more and more are learning other languages to which they are not native to. They are becoming multilingual and moving to the country to which the language they are interested in learning. David Sedaris is such a person; in his essay “Me Talk Pretty One Day” he wanted to be more fluent in French so he moved to Paris. Even though he had a difficult time learning the language that he thought he knew a lot about, when he took it in New York City. Even though his teacher was ruthless when it came to criticizing his French, he did not give up and studied harder and took those criticisms as a motivation. Another person that takes criticism and channels it towards her studies as a…show more content…
David’s rude teacher not only criticized, but broke down not only him, but also his fellow classmates emotionally as well. While his classmates where being humiliated for their word choices with their answer, he sat there thinking of answers that wouldn’t bring him the most humiliation. Speaking in French, he had to list a few things that he disliked; David’s list of things that he disliked was “blood sausage, intestinal pates, and brain pudding” were a few of the things he mentioned (Sedaris). Then he goes and delivers a few things that he liked such as “IBM typewriters, the French work for bruise, and my electric floor waxer” but he then forgot that he needed to give these objects a gender (Sedaris). Students left class feeling discouraged to keep on learning the language. David was all about speaking French when he first moved to Pairs, but after being put down he stray from the public. He was afraid to answer the phone, go get the paper and even going to the café intimidated him. Teachers are supposed to encourage students to learn and not give up, but this particular teacher discourages her student and left them with little motivation to learn. Learning a second language is hard enough, but to have this type of teacher makes the stress level go up. Fortunately for David he uses the criticism to his advantage. He studied harder and worked vigorously to obtain a lager French vocabulary
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