Ę ę
«ę» is a vowel of the Polish script, read as “nasal eh — "en" said through the nose”. A nasal e: the ear catches "en" — or "em" before b and p. Word-finally Poles swallow it themselves: robię comes out "ROH-bye" with the tail barely there. For example, in the word “język” — language. The Polish alphabet has 32 letters in total. The second nasal letter. It is heard only faintly, but it must be written: a lost tail is a spelling mistake. It appears, for example, in the word “dziękuję” — thank you.
In short
| Character | Ę ę |
| Sound | nasal eh — "en" said through the nose |
| What it is | a vowel |
In our course the character comes 8th of 32, its neighbours in the course are e and f, appears in 473 words of this site.
How to type Ę ę
- On a phone: press and hold e on the keyboard, and ę appears among the variants. If it does not, add the Polish keyboard in the keyboard settings.
- In Word on Windows: type U+0119 and press Alt+X right after it — the code turns into the character.
- On a Mac: switch to the Unicode Hex Input source, hold Option and type 0119.
- Unicode code points: ę — U+0119, Ę — U+0118. With them, the characters can be found in the character map of any system.
How it sounds
A nasal e: the ear catches "en" — or "em" before b and p. Word-finally Poles swallow it themselves: robię comes out "ROH-bye" with the tail barely there
The character in a word
A lone character is hard to remember: memory holds on to meaning, and a letter has none. The word it stands in provides that anchor.
- języklanguage
The character in the “polish tails and strokes” group
Nine signs: two nasals (ą, ę), three soft ones (ć, ś, ź — with ń), ó, ł, and their dots and tails. A tail marks a nasal sound, a stroke marks softness, a dot is history.
Words with this character
How to remember this character
A single letter is the hardest thing to remember: memory has nothing to hold on to — a character has no meaning. A three-step loop works: see the character, try to recall the sound (for «ę» it is “nasal eh — "en" said through the nose”, as in the word “język”), see the right answer.
And come back to it the next day, not in an hour: a check a day or two later beats a check the same day. Nobody holds the whole alphabet — 32 letters — at once.
- It is better to test yourself the next day than at the end of the same session. That is why a word comes back to you tomorrow.checked many timesAdesope, Trevisan & Sundararajan, 2017, Review of Educational Research 87(3) · g = 0.82 when tested a day or two later, against 0.56 on the same day.
- Studying a little every day gets more into your head than spending the same total time in one sitting.checked many timesDonovan & Radosevich, 1999, Journal of Applied Psychology 84(5) · 63 studies compared, difference d = 0.46 — a sizeable figure for a learning effect.
Frequently asked
How does the Polish character ę read?
As “nasal eh — "en" said through the nose” — it is a vowel of the Polish script. A nasal e: the ear catches "en" — or "em" before b and p. Word-finally Poles swallow it themselves: robię comes out "ROH-bye" with the tail barely there. For example, in the word “język” — language.