Me Talk Pretty One Day

The first thing everybody can notice in the story “Me talk pretty one day” is the title. People who know English, who can speak or read in English, who can understand English immediately, can say that there is a huge mistake in the title of this story. Why the author didn’t write it right?  He wanted to give us a hint of the idea of the story. It is all about people who are struggling with learning foreign languages.

The author made a main character of this story the forty-one year old woman, who moved to France to learn the language. I think people who have tried to learn another language cannot understand how it feels like. In this short story the author give us a good description of the main character’s feelings. For example, in the 2^nd paragraph, the woman has a feeling that everybody speaks French better than her even they are also from the different countries. The author describes her feeling very concretely using only one word “intimidating”. He shows that the woman felt that she is not like others. Still she could understand only a half of what the teacher said.

Author places a few teacher’s phrases with “words” that don’t have an exact meaning. The woman heard everything the teacher said but some words were like bunch of letters. The author makes the reader realize how the woman understood French by putting all those “no meaning” words. There are a couple of phrases: “Sometimes me cry alone at night” and “That be common for I, also, but be more strong, you” that don’t have correct spelling. I understand why he does it. These phrases don’t make sense for people who know French.

She could speak only this way, making weird mistakes. Author wants to tell us how usually people are trying to talk even making stupid mistakes.

In this story the woman says that she was convinced that everything she said was wrong. It is not true. Making mistakes, she learned more and more French, but the author placed this saying to describe her situation. He places some examples like the ignoring the phone ringing; how she pretended to be deaf, when someone was asking any question. It’s a true story. For most people, it might seem funny, even ridiculous, but it’s a true of her life. She was afraid to seem stupid. Given examples make sense in explaining all situations she was involved in.

The teacher plays a negative character. She is making her students feel uncomfortable. There is a phrase: Over time it became impossible to believe that any of us would ever improve”. When I read it, I thought that the teacher was not a good person. She doesn’t want to understand how that woman felt. Every teacher’s job is to help the students. She didn’t do her job well in this case. She didn’t help them. Then, I read the last few paragraphs and realize that teacher by pushing her students and making them feel kind of miserable made a great job. She made them understand more French. And they wanted to learn more. The last phrase is all about woman’s understanding why the teacher did it. The author wrote a good story. And all phrases and examples showed this situation more deeply, inside. I liked it because I was in similar situation. Reading this story, I understood that author showed everything how it was, how it felt like.