If you’ve ever tried to learn another language, you’ll know just how tricky it really can be.

It’s hard enough to keep the Duolingo bird happy, let alone actually get your skills up to scratch for conversations with native speakers.

Studies suggest that it takes between two and three years of being immersed in a language before you can become fluent, and that’s a big commitment.

However, the woman in this story is about to visit her Polish boyfriend’s parents.

And with just a couple of weeks to go, he’s made his expectations about her language skills quite clear.

Read on to learn his demands.

AITA for refusing to learn my boyfriend’s parents’ language?

I am 27, and have been dating my 29-year-old boyfriend for a little over a year.

We met through mutual friends and immediately hit it off.

To this point, our relationship has been nothing but great, except for this one story.

My boyfriend was born in Poland and both of his parents are Polish, but he went to international schools growing up and has been living in the US for the past eight years.

That means that he speaks English like a native speaker, and only speaks Polish around his parents or other family members.

I have never met his parents because they still live in Poland and I work a very demanding job, so we never really had time to go visit them.

But this year I got promoted, which also means more free days.

We will be going to Poland around Christmas and we will spend two to three weeks there.

Since we first decided on going I have been super excited to meet his family and discover the country he grew up in.

But this was where the friction in their relationship began.

Here’s where we started to have a problem: my boyfriend asked if I could start learning Polish before we go to Poland, so that I could communicate with his family.

I completely understand why he would ask and have no problem with the idea itself, however for multiple reasons this would be complicated for me, so I said no.

He got a bit confused and asked why so I explained.

First of all, we are leaving for Poland on December 19th which is in two weeks.

There’s no way I’ll have time to learn a language in two weeks, especially since Polish is pretty difficult.

Also, I currently have a lot of work to do before I can leave for the holidays, so I have very little time to spare.

And lastly, I’ve been asked by my company to learn Italian for professional reasons, so I’m currently learning it, and I feel like starting a new language now would make it all tangled up in my head.

Read on to find out how the boyfriend reacted.

I told him that I could learn some simple words and phrases, but that there was no way I’d be able to communicate with his family members in Polish in two weeks.

Also for context, both of his parents speak English pretty well, and some of his other family members do too.

I suggested that he could translate for us if needed, but he doesn’t want to.

He got angry at me and said that I was disrespectful to his family and I wasn’t making efforts to understand his culture.

He went on a rant about how Americans never make efforts to speak other languages.

(I speak three languages fluently and am learning another one.)

Yikes! This situation just kept escalating.

He even told me that I should just stay here and not come with him for the holidays.

I don’t know what to do.

I can understand his point of view and try to make efforts, but what he’s asking me is just not doable.

I don’t know if I’m in the wrong here.

AITA?

It’s understandable that this boyfriend might want his girlfriend to learn his native language, but in two weeks?

He should have broached this topic a whole lot earlier if he wanted her to be fluent!

Let’s see what Reddit had to say about this.

This person agreed that the boyfriend was being completely unreasonable.

While this native Polish speaker was shocked at what the boyfriend was asking.

One person even suggested she should reconsider the relationship.

It’s great that this boyfriend has all these romantic ideas of a Christmas spent conversing with his girlfriend in Polish, but he should have thought about this long ago.

She is being more than generous offering to learn some basic phrases on top of her already hectic pre-holiday workload.

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