¶ … David Sedaris The experience of learning a new language, especially at an adult age, should be both pleasant and rewarding, especially if one has the opportunity to learn it among those who are its native speakers. There is hardly something I can imagine being more pleasant than learning French in Paris. Yet, David Sedaris' essay, Me Talk Pretty One Day, presents an unfortunate experience as a beginner enrolled in a French class in a school in Paris.

Sedaris' enumeration of the places he got a discount for as a consequence of his enrolling in school is announcing a humorous story about the experience a forty-one-year-old has when going back to school to start all over again, just like a six-year-old. Since the discount tickets to puppet shows and Festyland are more appropriate for the latter kind of age, the irony of an adult of forty one still getting them is obvious.

The story that follows that humorous...

The story keeps its humorous tone that is destined to relax what would otherwise be an account of an unpleasant experience. For example, the author describes the teeth of one of the Polish girls who had the misfortune to introduce themselves first, as having "the size of tombstones." The macabre comparison and the exaggeration are destined to make the reader smile while imagining the poor girl struggling to express her likes and dislikes through her huge front teeth, in a language that she does not master.
The ethnic numerous ethnic references in the text, like for example, that referring to Carlos, the Argentine, who loved "wine, music, and in his words "making sex with the woman's of the world" are bringing out cliches about different nationalities…