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, there are aspects that can make the initial approach to Polish less daunting than it might seem. Crucially, 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 an entirely new script like 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, each representing a distinct sound:
While these new letters and some of the consonant clusters can seem intimidating at first, a significant advantage of Polish is its highly phonetic spelling. Once you learn the sound each letter (or common letter combination) makes, you can generally pronounce words accurately as they are written, and spell them as they sound. This consistency is often a welcome relief compared to the many irregularities and silent letters found in English pronunciation.
Additionally, while the complex case system (discussed later as a challenge) is demanding, one of its consequences is a more flexible word order than in English. Because the grammatical function of a word is often clear from its ending, speakers have more freedom in how they structure sentences for emphasis. While there are still common and natural-sounding word orders, this flexibility can sometimes be forgiving for learners as they construct sentences.
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).
Beyond nouns and their cases, the Polish verb system presents its own set of significant challenges. One of the most fundamental and initially confusing concepts for English speakers is verb aspect. Most Polish verbs come in pairs: an imperfective form (describing ongoing, repeated, or incomplete actions) and a perfective form (describing completed, one-time actions). For example, "czytać" means "to be reading" or "to read habitually," while "przeczytać" means "to read (and finish) something." English often conveys these nuances through different tenses or auxiliary verbs, but in Polish, it's built into the verb itself, requiring learners to choose the correct aspect for almost every verb use.
Furthermore, Polish verbs conjugate extensively, changing their endings based on person (I, you, he/she/it, we, you all, they), number (singular, plural), tense (past, present, future), and mood. While conjugation is familiar from other European languages, the sheer number of patterns and irregularities can be daunting.
Finally, a particularly notorious area is verbs of motion. Polish has a highly nuanced system for expressing movement, using different verbs depending on whether the motion is on foot or by vehicle, whether it's a one-way trip or a round trip, whether it's habitual or a single instance, and how all these interact with verb aspect. Mastering these distinctions requires considerable practice and exposure.
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.