Learn Polish for Travel, Work and Study

Polish is written in the Latin alphabet with nine letters of its own: ą, ć, ę, ł, ń, ó, ś, ź and ż. They look forbidding and behave well. Each letter or pair of letters stands for one sound, so “ł” is always the English w, “w” is always v, “ó” and “u” sound the same, as do “rz” and “ż”, and the stress falls on the second-to-last syllable of nearly every word. The famous clusters — “sz”, “cz”, “szcz” — are hushing sounds English has too, in “shoe” and “church”, only written at greater length. An hour with the alphabet lets a beginner read a timetable aloud, and a Polish listener will usually understand it.

The grammar is where the work is. Nouns, adjectives and even people's names take seven cases, so the ending tells you who is doing what to whom; there are three genders in the singular; and almost every verb exists as a pair, one form for an action going on — “robić”, to be doing — and one for an action completed — “zrobić”, to get done. None of this is irregular in the way English spelling is irregular. It is a large, consistent system, and learners who accept that the endings take years rather than weeks usually come to enjoy it.

Politeness is built into the grammar. A stranger, an official or an older person is addressed as “pan” (sir) or “pani” (madam) with the verb in the third person, so “Czy pan mówi po angielsku?” asks a man, word for word, whether the gentleman speaks English. Colleagues often settle on a middle way — “pani” or “pan” with the first name, as in “Pani Anno” or “Panie Marku” — and the informal “ty” is offered rather than taken; the offer comes from whoever is older or more senior. Young people use “ty” with each other from the first minute.

One Polish serves the whole country. The language of the evening news in Warsaw is the language of a village shop near the eastern border, with only small regional colour on top: Kraków goes outside “na pole” where Warsaw goes “na dwór”, Poznań calls potatoes “pyry”, and some families in Upper Silesia speak Silesian at home. A learner never has to choose a dialect. Beyond Poland, the same Polish is the home language of long-settled communities across the eastern border, in Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine.

For an English speaker Polish belongs to the harder group of European languages. The US Foreign Service Institute allows around 1,100 classroom hours to reach professional working proficiency — the same as Russian or Czech, and roughly twice the time for Spanish. The curve is uneven rather than steep throughout. Greetings, numbers, a meal and a train ticket come within a few weeks, because the sounds are regular; understanding a reply at full speed takes months; the endings keep arriving for years. The consolation is that a wrong ending almost never stops a Pole from understanding you.

How much Polish you need depends on how far you go from the big cities. In them, hotels, museums, ticket machines and most restaurants work in English, and younger people speak it well, though the older generation often learned Russian at school instead. In a small town, at a pharmacy, on a regional bus, in the cafeteria-style “bar mleczny” and on every form at a clinic or a government office, Polish is the only language. The same line runs through working life: the international service centres hire in English and other European languages, while Polish companies, hospitals, courts and public offices work in Polish. Universities teach most degrees in Polish; programmes in English exist, mainly at master's level and in medicine, and even the English-language medical divisions put their students in front of Polish-speaking patients.

• Circles and triangles: Many Polish toilet doors carry no words, only a shape: a circle for women, a triangle for men. Visitors read it the wrong way round so often that the signs count as a national joke.
• “No” means yes: In casual speech “no” is a yeah: “no, jasne” is “yeah, of course”, and “no dobra” settles a matter with “OK then”. The Polish word for no is “nie”.
• Names change shape: Kraków becomes “do Krakowa” on the way there and “w Krakowie” on arrival; Warszawa becomes “z Warszawy” when you leave it. The name you hear on the platform is rarely the one on the map.
• Surnames have a gender: Mr Kowalski's wife is Mrs Kowalska, their daughter is Kowalska too, and the whole family is “Kowalscy”. A Polish passport can therefore show a surname that differs from the father's by one letter.
• The last nasal vowels in Slavic: Polish is the only Slavic language that kept the old nasal vowels, written “ą” and “ę”. At the end of a word “ę” relaxes into a plain e, so “dziękuję” ends in -e, not in a French-sounding nasal.
• Half to three: Timetables use the 24-hour clock, but spoken Polish counts towards the coming hour: “wpół do trzeciej”, half to three, is half past two.
• False friends: A “pensja” is a salary; “ewentualnie” means possibly, not eventually; a “dres” is a tracksuit; “ordynarny” means vulgar, not ordinary; and “sympatyczny” is likeable, not sympathetic.

Polish levels follow the CEFR, the European scale from A1 to C2, and one exam sits at the centre of the system: the state certificate of Polish as a foreign language, issued by the State Commission for the Certification of Proficiency in Polish as a Foreign Language. It is set at every level for adults, with a separate version for children and teenagers. Besides listening, reading, writing and speaking, the written part from B1 up contains a test of grammatical accuracy, and that is the part that decides most results. A pass needs half the points in each part at B1 and 60 per cent from B2 up; the certificate never expires. Two international exams stand beside it: telc Język polski B1·B2, one sitting whose result is either level, and ECL, coordinated from the University of Pécs, which runs from A2 to C1. Neither tests grammar on its own.

What the authorities ask is simple to state. The EU long-term resident permit requires B1, proven with the state certificate, a telc or ECL certificate, or a school or university diploma earned in Polish; children under sixteen are exempt. Recognition as a Polish citizen also requires B1, but here only the state certificate or a certificate from a school taught in Polish counts. The Karta Polaka, the card for people of Polish descent, is granted after a conversation in Polish, usually with a consul. A degree taught in Polish normally asks for B2 — a certificate from any of the three systems or a university's preparatory year of intensive Polish serves as proof — and a state certificate at C1 lets its holder study in Polish at a public university without tuition fees. Doctors and dentists who trained in another language pass a separate Polish exam set by the Supreme Medical Council before they may practise.

As for time: regular classes bring most adults to A2 within months and to B1 in a year or more, and B2 is what a preparatory year is built to reach. State exams are held several times a year at authorised centres, mostly universities, in Poland and abroad.

Because so much of Polish lives in the endings, a self-study kit needs a place for inflection beside the dictionary and the flashcards. A dictionary that shows the full declension of each entry saves hours of guessing. A flashcard deck works far better when each noun is learned together with its genitive — “pies, psa” — and each verb with its partner — “robić, zrobić” — because the form in the dictionary is rarely the one you meet in the street. And listening to real speech with subtitles trains the ear for the one thing no book provides: Polish at full speed.

A tutor does two things for Polish that an app cannot. The first is the ear: Polish separates “sz” from “ś” and “cz” from “ć”, the difference between “kasza”, groats, and “Kasia”, a woman's name, and nobody hears a distinction that has never been corrected in their own mouth. The second is speed: the right ending — “dwa bilety” but “pięć biletów” — has to arrive without a pause, and only conversation with a patient listener gets it there.