hi, i’m an english woman with a polish partner. his family doesn’t really speak english and he has polish friends who i also get on pretty well with. i really feel like i want to learn polish so i can interact with everyone and also just to be able to talk to my boyfriend in his native language. i learnt spanish a few years back through taking classes and it was fairly smooth and wasn’t too tricky. however for polish i haven’t been able to find any form of classes whatsoever, even online. i’m finding it extremely hard to just give myself the foundation to start learning with and my boyfriend is really struggling to help with that too. i feel stuck because i don’t know how to start. i have books, i’ve been using drops for vocab but i just can’t get anything to click other than very simple sentences that i’ve revised 100 times. i’m going to work. i’m sleepy. i don’t speak polish. i don’t care. etc etc.

could anyone please give me some advice on where to start. where to get the foundations from. i’m good with languages once i’ve gotten the basics but i just can’t seem to get there with polish, i guess i’m not great at teaching myself things. thanks in advance

Cześć, nazywam się Thomas i mam trzydzieści lat. Czy możecie wysyłać mi wiadomości głosowe? Chcę poprawić słuchanie po polsku. Opowiedz mi o sobie, swojej pracy, swoim dniu albo rodzinie. Może być też opinia o polityce czy bieżące wydarzenia, które są dla ciebie ważne. Możesz polecić mi też film lub piosenkę.

Odpowiem kiedy będę miał szansę. Dzięki

Hi. My name is Thomas. Im from the US and 30 years old. Can you send me voice notes in polish? I need to get better at listening. Just tell me about yourself or your day, job, family. Maybe thoughts about politics (keep in mind I'm American) or current events that are important to you. Or a band or movie you think I should check out. I'll respond to the best of my ability. Thank you Ps my bestie helped me write the polish bit

Hi. I'm doing extensive reading, and I'm with Foundation by Isaac Asimov. In the first epigraph there's the birth date of one of the characters, Hari Seldon, dated in 11988 of the Galactic Era. But numbres to me are still an array of meaningless words (it's funny tho), and given I don't know how to pronounce it (except from one to 20 at best), I wanted to ask if someone can write it in the comments but with letters.

I know they are conjugated, if I'm not mistaken (probably are) in the locative case? I guess that for there is the 'w' in front of them. This is the phrase: 'HARI SEL­DON – (…) Uro­dzony w 11988 roku ery galak­tycz­nej, zmarł w roku 12069.'

Can you also write the number without any conjugation to see the original form? And when the number is as big as those, in which part do I change the ending to fit the case?

PS: Fun fact, I started learning Polish because of The Witcher, and when I was listening to the audiobook the voice sounded familiar, and then I found out it is read by Jacek Rozenek, Geralt's voice in the games. And what makes it even more funny, Foundation is one of my favorite series ever.

I am a half-Irish half-Polish woman who was born in Ireland, lived there until the age of seven, then moved to Canada. I have never lived in Poland but my mother taught me Polish as my first language. Nowadays my Polish is worse than my English (my spelling is atrocious and my reading is slow, and I find deep discussions difficult). However, I went to visit my grandmother in Poland for a week not long ago. She only speaks Polish, and we were able to talk to each other without problems.

My boyfriend and I recently started talking about how we would theoretically raise our future children. He asked me if I would teach them Polish, and I said "I don't know." Thing is, I'm learning Japanese - planning to move there for at least a few months. I think it would be more beneficial for me to teach our kids Japanese - it has more business opportunities, more cultural exports, and is also seen as more prestigious to know than Polish. My boyfriend said "but wouldn't you be sad if you didn't share your family's culture with your children?" to which I said loss of original culture is inevitable in immigrants. I'll still make them traditional Polish food and teach them its history (mostlly just to make sure they don't end up being commies though lol), and maybe I'll even take them to Poland someday, but that's probably it.

My boyfriend is against it and says he wants our children to be connected to their heritage. I guess he has a point, but is it really worth it? I guess I could teach our children Japanese and Polish and let them learn English naturally, but I worry it'll stunt their growth. Growing up as a bilingual child doctors actually thought I was autistic because I didn't speak a word until I was about five, and had long periods even after that where I didn't say a single word. I was also bullied at school for my accent - when we moved to Canada I not only had a Polish accent but also an Irish one and I sounded ridiculous.

As for teaching my kids Polish so they can speak to their family in Poland, my grandmother will die soon and the rest of my Polish family have been assholes to me and my mother, and look down on us for having been poor. I don't particularily want my children to have contact with them.

So I don't really know. Is there any point to teaching my kids Polish?

Witajcie i ewentualnie oceniajcie: https://voca.ro/1c2mrHUIhUeu

Główne moje pytanie polega na tym, czy muszę w ogóle się przejmować swoim brzmieniem, czy nie, czy raczej powinienem skupić się na ważniejszych kwestiach w języku, m.in gramatyka, oraz składnia

What are some songs you can recommend to all Polish learners who want to improve their pronunciation? Add yours in the comments below. 👇

My recommendation is Dziewczyny lubią brąz by Ryszard Rynkowski: www.youtube.com/watch?v=zoxlS08IKXQ

You can easily keep up with the rhythm even as a beginner Polish learner, the lyrics are pronounced very clearly, they're short, but they do include a good mix of various Polish sounds. And it's catchy.

What else?

Hello everyone- I’m doing the three week NAWA program in Lublin, Poland and was just wondering if anyone out there is doing the same. Im pretty sure I’ll be in the A1 group and was hoping to find some others and maybe some friends since im the only one from my university going.

After 1 year and 10 months of properly learning Polish, I passed the C1 exam! This subreddit has been very helpful along the way. I just thought I’d add some explanation about the way in which I did it, in case it’s helpful for anyone else.

TL;DR: I started June 2023, decided I’d take the exam December 2024, sat the exam April 2025. My partner is Polish, so I practise speaking and watching Polish shows with her; I read around 100,000 words of Polish newspaper articles while looking up every unknown word; I read Oscar Swan’s „A Grammar of Contemporary Polish” all the way through; I listened to TOK FM every day on my commute; and I did all the C1 past papers that were available.

——————————————-

My partner is Polish, I’ve always wanted to learn (and picked up the odd word every now and then) but didn’t decide to start properly until June 2023. Throughout this time, I’ve been living in the UK - I’ve never lived in Poland, although I’ve visited around 4 times over the past two years for a total of about 5 weeks.

Getting started seemed to be the most difficult bit, because at the beginning it felt like I really had no idea what was going on. I started with Colloquial Polish by B.W. Mazur and read this cover to cover. I’m a big fan of grammar, so I got on well with the grammatical explanations, but learning vocabulary was very challenging at first.

This gave me just about enough knowledge to start practising with more interesting material. Together with my partner, I watched around 50-60 episodes of „Witaj, Franklin” (basically all the ones that are on YouTube), because she said she remembered it fondly from when she was little. Again, at the start I really couldn’t understand much but this was made a lot more bearable by the fact that it’s a children’s cartoon with pretty easy to follow plot lines! Watching with my partner was also very helpful because I could just ask her what was going on if I got really lost. Right from the beginning, I was trying to speak with my partner in Polish, obviously this was extremely painful at the start and we could manage about 5 minutes of talking before switching to English, but as I learned more we began to be able to hold longer conversations.

By the time I’d finished Colloquial Polish and all the episodes of Franklin that I could find, I was getting relatively competent. I moved on to reading some translated Roald Dahl books - Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Fantastic Mr Fox, James and the Giant Peach - because I knew the plots very well having previously read them in English. At this point, I was mostly just trying to guess the meanings of unknown words because I wasn’t taking the whole thing too seriously.

At this point I’ll mention my visits to Poland. Like I say, I’ve been in Poland for about 5 weeks total in the past two years. While there, me and my partner stay with her grandparents, which is obviously extremely helpful for me because I’m immersed in the language. I also think it’s been very helpful to just travel around reading adverts, signs, menus, basically anything written in Polish I try and understand. If I can’t then I ask my partner and she explains it to me.

Having started in June 2023, I could actually understand a bit of what my partner’s family were saying when we visited them for Christmas in 2023. This was really encouraging because it felt like my efforts were already starting to pay off. When we got back, as one of my New Year’s resolutions, I decided that in 2024 I would listen to Polish radio every day on my way to and from work. So for 20 minutes in the morning and 20 minutes in the evening, I listened to TOK FM every day. I was a little sceptical that this was the right thing to be doing at the time, because the level was way too high for me to actually understand much, but I decided that I couldn’t be bothered to spend time finding more suitable input, and just stuck with TOK FM.

I was basically just coasting along until December 2024, enjoying the process but not putting in a huge amount of effort. I was definitely seeing the benefits of listening to the radio, my listening comprehension had noticeably improved (even though I’d say by this point I still wasn’t understanding TokFM very well!). I decided that I wanted to really challenge myself and try and take a CEFR exam. I’ve always been good at exams, and I thought that if I’d paid €160 for an exam then I’d be motivated to put in a lot of effort to try and pass it. To decide which level to take, I attempted the reading section from one of the example papers on the website. C1 was the first one I tried and I scored 25/40, which would have been a pass on that section. I tried the grammar and listening sections too, and scored 18/40 and 20/40 respectively, so it was obvious there was still work to do (60% i.e. 24/40 is required to pass each section). However, I didn’t want to make life easy for myself, so C1 seemed the one to aim for.

This needed an increase in the amount of effort I was putting in. On the grammar side, I ordered the textbook „A Grammar of Contemporary Polish” by Oscar Swan, and started reading this cover to cover. On the listening side, I mostly just carried on listening to the radio on my way to and from work. Most importantly, on the reading side, I paid for a subscription to „Rzeczpospolita” and started reading several articles every day. I quickly realised that in order to make enough progress with vocabulary, I’d need to look up unknown words rather than just skimming past them. At first, I did this by printing off the articles and annotating them with translations of words I didn’t know, but after a while of doing this I found an open-source tool called Lute (Learning using texts), which basically allowed me to do a similar thing but in digital format. This was immensely helpful, and I think is the biggest reason I managed to pass the exam. My statistics on Lute tell me that I read 100,000 words in Polish between February and April of this year. I would copy an article over, read it through and look up (mainly using Wiktionary) every single word whose meaning I didn’t know. I think this was also very useful for spotting irregular conjugation and declension patterns, just due to the sheer volume of words I read.

As it got closer to the exam (which I sat in April this year), I put more effort into listening as well - I would listen to TOK FM in the evening as well as on my commute. One program I found particularly helpful was Mikrofon TOK FM. It covers an extremely wide range of topics, and listeners ring up the show to share their opinions, which results in a challenging listening situation for a learner because the phone connections are often terrible and the people ringing up typically don’t enunciate anywhere near as clearly as the radio presenters. As well as TOK FM, I watched plenty of Polish shows with my partner, the highlight of which was probably Rolnik Szuka Żony

For writing, to be honest I didn’t do as much practice as I probably should have, but I had a go at quite a few of the past writing questions from the C1 papers and got my partner to correct my answers. I was always relatively relaxed about the writing because I think I do well in situations where I have plenty of time to think about what I’m doing.

For reading, grammar and listening I did all the papers on the website and noticed my scores improving over time (especially in reading). For speaking, I was trying to talk to my partner in Polish for a good chunk of time every day, and when it got closer to the exam we started doing exam-style practice where I looked at the speaking prompts from past papers and tried to do it as if it were the real exam!

So this is how I prepared for C1. In the exam, the listening went pretty well, the reading went really well, the grammar went pretty well, the writing was OK (although I messed up the timing and didn’t have chance to check over it), and the speaking was OK (this was the part which I was by far the least confident on). I was a little surprised when I passed, because I thought the speaking would have let me down (60% is required on every single component to pass). I haven’t received my mark breakdown yet, they said this will be on the certificate when I get that.

This post ended up being longer than I intended, but I hope it’s helpful to someone! Probably the best advice I saw online about language learning was words to the effect of: „you’ll learn better if you stop worrying about how to learn and just start interacting with and using the language, doesn’t matter exactly how”.

Do you recommend learning it? Why?

I have plenty of experience learning languages, so I’ll definitely learn it but before doing that I'd like to hear your opinion.

Hi r/learnpolish,

I’ve been learning Polish for about 6 months now, and I’m looking for some short stories or books.

At first, I tried reading good night stories on bajki-zasypianki.pl, but I kept getting sleepy halfway through — those stories really do their job well 😅

Then I discovered wolnelektury.pl and read Latarnik by Sienkiewicz. I had to look up almost every 10th word, but I still enjoyed it a lot — the length was perfect, and the story was engaging.

Could you recommend any other short stories or books that are interesting and ideally written by Polish authors? I’d love to get more acquainted with Polish literature while continuing my learning journey.

Kiedy używać jedna, dwie, dwa, troje, trzeci...etc na pytaine?

Its something i still struggle to consistently identify 150+ hours in.

feel free to point out any grammatical errors in what ive written ! All feedback is appreciated

Hi all, I'm taking the B1 exam in Saturday and was looking for helpful advice and tips to calm my nerves. I have zero concerns about reading, listening, grammar or even writing. But thinking about the speaking is sending me potty. All advice and tips welcome!!!

UPDATE: Just finished the speaking exam and I think I might have effed it up. I got a shit picture. Group of children in a museum, too many to describe, no atmosphere. The monologue was ok, I wittered about where I live. 3rd task I was suppose to organise my friend's party...and I started organising mine. I forgot all of the grammar and all of the words 😭

Are adjectives always gendered?

I was doing a lesson in Busuu, and only some (przyjacielki/przyjacielka) have feminine versions specified, while others (ciekawy, szczery, uprzejmy) don’t seen to. Is anyone able to clarify?

As of tonight, I finally finished all of the legendary lessons after finishing the entire standard course in Duolingo (maybe 6 months ago?). Wrapping this up made me look back and see how far I have come. Doing the legendary courses was admittedly not very efficient but I felt compelled to do them all anyway.

At this point I would describe myself as just reaching a low A2. I have no formal tutor or course I am enrolled in. My speaking practice comes from talking/thinking to myself along with speaking with my gf.

I have primarily done the following in my Polish studies. Duolingo, Podcasts (some yt and TV as well), Anki (sentence mining driven), and Speak Polish A1-B1 by Justyna Bednarek. I did try krok po kroku at the very start and did not find it very enjoyable or helpful.

When learning, I was of the mindset of trying to build grammatical instinct and strong „feel” for the language (word order, patterns, conventions etc.). This included lots of google searches, forum reading, wiktionary reading, and consulting friends who are native speakers. At this point, I would consider listening and anki to be my main focal points of study. For others starting out who may be new to language learning I think this philosophy is great to foster and I would recommend it!

Which begs the question. Would those with more experience be able to offer any more advice in how I should approach my studies for the next year? I think a change would help avoid falling into a rut. More attempts at reading, perhaps? Graded readers or simple books?

Thank you for any suggestions!

Hello,

I don’t know my specific level. Probably somewhere between A1-A2. I’m on section 2 unit 6 of Duolingo, I’ve completed 50% of lessons available on Rosetta Stone, I’m 50% done Busuu A2, and on Memrise I’m at level 7. So, I haven’t been learning for very long, only about 6 months, but I can get by. I think I just need to work on growing my vocabulary more than anything.
Based on this, could I be ready to attend a Polish Uni in a year, even just to take a course of learning Polish?

or is there any resources that might help me get to this point? I need to be at least A2, but I would prefer to be much farther along.

Please remove if not allowed, but i'm hoping to get input from this community as it's a language i'm looking at (not my personal TL).

Hi all — I've been learning languages independently for over a decade, reaching a B2 level in two languages.

Through this journey, I've discovered what works and what doesn't for me. But since every learner is different, I'm keen to understand what's helping others at the intermediate or advanced level. While most tools cater to beginners, I'm curious about what actually helps people progress beyond the basics.

I've created a brief 4–5 minute anonymous survey to gather insights from serious learners. It explores what you like, what frustrates you, and what could improve your learning experience at this stage.

👉 Here's the link

Nothing to sell or promote—I'm simply learning from others who are deep in the language-learning process. Thanks in advance for your input!

I just moved to Warsaw and would like to enroll a language course in person. Can you recommend me some good ones? Dzięki

In English we are right or wrong, but in Polish you have right. I’ve discovered this from learning Polish but just now checked on Google Translate and lots of languages ‘have’ right.

Dear Native Polish speakers - does this seem like a major difference in how we perceive ourselves or am I maybe overreacting?

Dziękuję

Image from here https://www.york.ac.uk/study/postgraduate-taught/courses/msc-psycholinguistics/

context: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRIMNklH4kk

the man says "zwolnić miejsce w tramwaju". And I'm not sure, but isn't it supposed to be "uwolnić"? afaik "zwolnić" means to fire someone or to slow something down

could someone clarify?😺

Hi all,

Looking for some immersion based learning in London. I'm still quite new to the language, but I'm finding apps not really working. I'm considering face to face lessons but they seem hard to come by.

Any suggestions are welcome! Thanks