Polish from scratch

The order

1. Week 1: sounds and new letters. You know the script, but the language has its own reading rules: a few letters sound different from what the eye expects, and some sounds are new to you. There are not many, and the first week is enough for them.
2. Weeks 2–3: rescue phrases. “I don't understand”, “repeat”, “slower”, “thank you”. They bring back a conversation that has already gone wrong — which makes them more useful than any set of nouns.
3. Weeks 3–5: the first hundred words. Greetings, politeness, numbers, food, directions. Five to seven new ones per session plus review of the old — a pace you can keep up for months.
4. Next: short conversations. Ordering at a café, asking the way, meeting someone. These conversations are predictable: they hold few lines, and almost all of them repeat from one to the next.

How much to practice a day

Twenty to thirty minutes split into several sessions beats the same two hours once a week. This is one of the most reliably reproduced results in the psychology of learning — and the only reason a lesson in the app is built from short sets.

• Studying a little every day gets more into your head than spending the same total time in one sitting.checked many times
  Donovan & Radosevich, 1999, Journal of Applied Psychology 84(5) · 63 studies compared, difference d = 0.46 — a sizeable figure for a learning effect.
• Study spread over days wins not only in experiments but in ordinary classrooms, with real students.checked many times
  Mawson & Kang, 2025, Behavioral Sciences 15(6):771 · 22 studies, d = 0.54 (confidence interval 0.31–0.77). The authors warn that individual studies disagree widely.
• 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 times
  Cepeda 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.

And one more thing that helps more than any schedule: decide not “I will practice” but exactly when and where.

• Deciding exactly when and where helps more than deciding to study at all. “After my morning coffee, in the kitchen, ten minutes” works; “I really should get to it” does not.checked many times
  Gollwitzer & Sheeran, 2006, Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 38 · 94 trials, more than 8,000 participants, d = 0.65.
• A habit takes about two months to settle on average: two and a half weeks for some people, more than eight months for others. One missed day does not noticeably set it back.checked little
  Lally et al., 2010, European Journal of Social Psychology 40(6) · 66 days on average, ranging from 18 to 254. Missing a single day had no noticeable effect on habit formation.

Is it too late to start as an adult

This is almost everyone's first question, and the honest answer is more encouraging — and less magic — than either side usually assumes.

• It is not too late for an adult to learn a language. Grammar comes harder with the years, but there is no age after which the door closes.checked little
  Hartshorne, Tenenbaum & Pinker, 2018, Cognition 177; criticism — van der Slik et al., 2022 · Data on 669,498 people: the ability to pick up grammar stays high until about 17 and then declines. A re-analysis of the same data finds no sharp boundary — the decline comes out gradual.
• Fear of making mistakes gets in the way of learning a language, and noticeably so. The link turns up study after study, and together those studies cover almost twenty thousand people.checked many times
  Teimouri, Goetze & Plonsky, 2019, Studies in Second Language Acquisition 41(2) · 19,933 participants from 23 countries; correlation with results r = −0.36.

In practice: an adult picks up words faster than a child and grammar intuition slower. For everyday language that is a trade in your favor.

Next

• Polish alphabetAll letters and how they are read
• How long to studyAn honest estimate, with caveats
• PhrasebookPhrases ready to use
• How to choose which language to learna note
• Is it too late to start as an adulta note
• Do streaks and rewards helpa note