Is Polish hard to learn? When you see this question in Polish — “Czy język polski jest trudny do nauczenia?” — you might be tempted to answer “yes.” Or rather “tak” (the Polish word for “yes”).
The Polish version of that question nearly answers itself. With its consonant clusters and words so different from English, Polish doesn’t give the impression of being an easy language to learn.
| Polish | English |
|---|---|
| szczęście | happiness |
| źdźbło | blade of grass |
| chrząszcz | beetle |
| przepraszam | sorry |
| przyszłość | future |
| żółw | turtle |
| wszystko | everything |
| rzeczywistość | reality |
| szczypiorek | chives |
| skrzydło | wing |
| pszczoła | bee |
| wstręt | disgust |
On the flip side, Polish uses a version of the Latin alphabet. That’s the same kind of alphabet that English uses.
So when you learn Polish, you don’t have to learn the Cyrillic alphabet, used by some of the other Slavic languages (like Russian and Bulgarian for example).
And yet, Polish has some additional letters.
While Spanish has just one additional letter (ñ), Polish has several. See the list below:
Berlin, the capital of Germany, is less than 50 miles from the Polish border. Interesting bit of trivia: the German word for “border,” which is “Grenze” comes from Polish (where the word is “granica”).
Despite the proximity between the two countries, their languages are not that closely related. German is a Germanic language. So is English. But Polish is a Slavic language.
Slavic and Germanic languages are two branches of the Indo-European language family, a very large family that includes most of the European languages (with some exceptions like Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian, and Maltese).
So, Polish is not completely unrelated to English. But the connection is rather remote.
If you browse through the thousand most common Polish words, you will quickly notice that very few of them resemble their English translations.
Because there is so little overlap between Polish and English vocabulary, learning Polish requires extra effort for English speakers to memorize all these new and unfamiliar words.
This sets Polish apart from easier-to-learn languages like Italian, with its Latin-based words that often align with their English counterparts, or Dutch, with its Germanic words that frequently resemble their English translations.
In Polish, most words have Slavic roots. While in English, most words have Germanic or Latin roots.
Another intimidating and rather difficult aspect of Polish vocabulary words is the frequent occurrence of consonant clusters within those words. For example, look at the following Polish words: “wzgórze” (hill), “Chrząszcz” (beetle), and “najczęstszy” (most frequent).
English speakers are used to words that have only a few consonants before the appearance of a vowel. Polish words that have many consonants in a row are difficult for them to pronounce.
Vocabulary is not the only difficult aspect of learning Polish. The grammar is also challenging because it is, in many ways, rather different from English grammar.
In Polish, nouns have grammatical genders. Sure, so do Spanish, French, and Italian, and those are among the easiest languages for English speakers to learn. But Polish has three (masculine, feminine, and neuter), while Spanish, French, and Italian have just two.
Well, you might point out that German has three grammatical genders, and it’s not that difficult a language. And yes, that is true —but German has only four grammatical cases, while Polish has seven.
Grammatical case declensions are one of the things that contribute to making Polish difficult for English speakers to learn. While they did exist in Old English, they have pretty much disappeared from modern English (except for pronouns which do change depending on the case).
The notion that Polish is a rather difficult language for English speakers to learn also aligns with the language difficulty ratings published by the Foreign Service Insitute.
They classify languages into four groups based on their difficulty level for English learners. The easiest languages (Spanish, Italian, Dutch, etc) are in group 1, and the hardest (Chinese, Japanese, Arabic) are in group 4.
Polish is in group 3, together with most other Slavic languages. Based on their estimate, it takes about 1100 class hours (44 weeks of full-time study) to reach a working proficiency in Polish.