Polish
Polish — Indo-European family, about 40 million speakers (estimate, Ethnologue). Script: the Latin alphabet, 32 letters, nine of them with diacritics: ą, ć, ę, ł, ń, ó, ś, ź, ż.
Where to start
A young course: the words, the lessons and the recordings are all here, but a native speaker has not read it end to end yet. Spot a rough edge — tell us and we will fix it.
- →Polish alphabetAll letters and how they are read
- →Polish wordsBy topic and alphabetically
- →PhrasebookPhrases ready to use
- →GrammarRules without jargon
- →Reading textsShort texts with translation
- →PronunciationWhat you hear and what is hard
- →From scratchWhere to start, and in what order
- →How long to studyAn honest estimate, with caveats
First words
Every conversation starts with them — and so does the first impression: one greeting in the local language and you stop being a stranger within a second.
- Cześćhisoft ch at the front: "chessht"
- dzień dobrygood dayThe neutral, polite greeting. With a stranger start here, not with cześć. It works for most of the day — Polish greeting hours have soft edges.
- dzień dobrygood morningPolish has no separate morning greeting: until noon it is the same dzień dobry. A trap for habit, not for the ear — hunting for a special "good morning" is pointless.
- dobry wieczórgood eveningó sounds like oo: "DOH-brih VEH-choor"
- dziękujęthank youThe polite "thank you", literally "I give thanks". Among friends you hear the short dzięki — said "DZHEN-kee", the cousin of a quick "thanks".
- proszęplease (asking)Literally "I ask" — and one of the most convenient words in the language. Please in a request, please when you hand something over, the reply to dziękuję ("don't mention it"), and the prompt: Proszę? — "sorry, what did you say?"
- do widzeniagoodbyeLiterally "until seeing" — the same root as English "vision". The neutral farewell for every occasion.
- pabyeThe simplest "bye" there is, often doubled: pa, pa. For your own circle only — you do not say this to a stranger.
About the language
| Native name | Polski |
| Official in | Poland |
| Also spoken in | Lithuania, Belarus, Germany, the United Kingdom and the USA |
| How many speakers | about 40 million speakers (estimate, Ethnologue) |
| Family | Indo-European family, Slavic group — its closest relatives are Czech and Slovak |
| Script | the Latin alphabet, 32 letters, nine of them with diacritics: ą, ć, ę, ł, ń, ó, ś, ź, ż |
| Writing direction | left to right |
Hard: spelling that misleads: sz, cz and rz are read as sh, ch and the s of “pleasure”, ł sounds like w, and the nasal ą and ę have nothing like them in English.
Easy: a familiar alphabet, and half the vocabulary is recognizable at first sight — the Slavic root or the Latin loanword is often the same.
What people most often take it up for: moving and working in Poland, paperwork and study, family and roots.
Curiosities in Polish
After the third partition of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1795, Poland vanished from the map for 123 years: in the part taken by Russia the language was pushed out of schools and offices, in the part taken by Prussia out of administration. Polish survived both — at home, in the villages, and in Warsaw’s underground “Flying University”.
Norman Davies, “God’s Playground: A History of Poland”, vol. II, 1981
How lessons work
A lesson is up to half an hour a day, split into three to five short sessions. A word comes back not on the course's schedule but at the moment you are about to forget it: the interval is computed by an algorithm from your own answers.
- The longer you want to keep a word, the longer the gap before reviewing it can be. To hold it for a week, review it after a day or two; to hold it for a year, after about three or four weeks.checked many timesCepeda et al., 2008, Psychological Science 19(11) · Over 1,350 participants, tested after delays of up to a year. The best gap is about 20–40% of the target interval when you need to remember for a week, and 5–10% when for a year.
- Recalling beats re-reading. Covering the translation and trying to remember it does more than reading it ten more times.checked many timesAdesope, Trevisan & Sundararajan, 2017, Review of Educational Research 87(3) · 188 experiments, 272 comparisons. g = 0.61; against plain re-reading 0.51, against passive review 0.93.
- A material reward promised for doing a task lowers the wish to take it up of your own accord once the reward is gone. Praise for what was done, on the contrary, keeps that wish alive.checked many timesDeci, Koestner & Ryan, 1999, Psychological Bulletin 125(6) · 128 experiments. A material reward promised in advance and the time later spent on the task by free choice: d = −0.44 for finishing, −0.40 for taking part, −0.28 for performance; a reward unrelated to the task, −0.14, not significant. Praise: +0.33.
Frequently asked
Where to start learning Polish?
With the sounds and the first hundred words: you know the script, but it has its own reading rules.
How many people speak Polish?
About 40 million speakers — an estimate; source: Ethnologue. Nobody runs an exact census of languages, and sources disagree by noticeable amounts.
Is Polish hard?
Spelling that misleads: sz, cz and rz are read as sh, ch and the s of “pleasure”, ł sounds like w, and the nasal ą and ę have nothing like them in English. At the same time, a familiar alphabet, and half the vocabulary is recognizable at first sight — the Slavic root or the Latin loanword is often the same.
Where is Polish spoken?
An official language in: Poland. Noticeable communities: Lithuania, Belarus, Germany, the United Kingdom and the USA.