Eventually the first guy tires of being mocked by this guy claiming not to speak English and beats the guy up.
Totally hilarious example of what you experienced taken to an extreme.
Almost everybody understood English and finally when I ran into somebody who didn't and used that Polish phrase, I realized I could have just said in English "I don't understand Polish" and it actually would have been clearer communication.
However, I did not end up with a Polish girlfriend. Your "She was gorgeous", is, I recall, redundant.
Your recollection is accurate
Towards the end I have no chance of understanding it.
Quite a ways in it emerged that they were from an Italian airline and speaking Italian. They were no doubt (we imagine) well used to speakers of Romance languages especially Spanish making themselves understood... she however was quite entertained.
(This being HN I suppose it's de rigeur to cite Richard Feynman's bit about Italian dialectical differences leaving room for him to entertain himself by amiably yelling made-up Italian to people in his neighborhood, who chalked up his unintelligibility to such differences, not realizing they were being trolled as it were...)
A friend who is learning Dutch once complained to me that Dutch speakers will switch to English the moment they hear you are struggling with the language. I suggested she should explicitly ask people to keep the conversation in Dutch.
In one instance, she did that, and the (native Dutch-speaking) person she was talking to agreed to her request, and then proceeded in English anyway! She asked that person multiple times, and they just kept speaking English without addressing her request. Baffling.
In bilingual places you'll see people switching mid-sentence when they have a better expression in the other language for what they are about to say.
- Wait! You can speak Netherlands?
- No. Sorry.
- But you can! I am speaking it!
- No you're not! You're speaking English!
He just blinked and walked off, probably assuming I was playing a trick, but my friend asked what that was all about, and had to convince me that she didn't understand anything he was saying, and wouldn't have said anything to me at all about it except that she heard me insist he was speaking English!
She asked me to try and remember what exactly I was hearing, and I realised I couldn't! I could only remember something like "do you know where [placename that sounded familiar] is?" and maybe that there was a heavy accent, but not exactly how it sounded.
Every now and then I think of this and I wonder if I actually understand English at all, or if I'm just so used to saying that I understand it (in response to something that sounds something like a question) that I started to believe it.