Is Polish hard to learn? An honest answer.
In short
- For English speakers, yes. The US State Department counts Polish among its “hard languages”, at about 44 weeks or 1,012 hours in class against 24 to 30 weeks for French, Spanish, Italian or Portuguese.
- That figure is the Department’s own estimate for a professional level of speaking and listening, and it gives no time for any lower level.
- In the author’s view, the difficulty sits in the endings, the sounds, the verbs and the words.
- Polish is a Slavic language, not a Romance one. A few things are easier than they look: there is no word for “a” or “the”, spelling follows rules, stress usually falls on the second-to-last syllable, and it uses the Latin alphabet.
- Start with the alphabet and its sounds, the words of your own life, and endings learnt inside whole phrases.
Before you start the journey of learning Polish, you may be wondering: “Is Polish hard to learn?” The short answer, for English speakers, is yes. The US State Department famously counts Polish among its “hard languages”. It says its students usually need about 44 weeks, or 1,012 hours in class, to reach a professional level of speaking and listening, against 24 to 30 weeks for French, Spanish, Italian or Portuguese.1
How hard learning Polish feels depends on a) which language(s) you already speak, b) what you want to do with Polish, and c) how much time you can give it.
If Polish feels hard, it doesn’t mean you are bad at languages. It is hard in ways that can be identified, and I have set them out below.
My reason
I am learning Polish so I can speak to my wife’s family. Before learning Polish, I had studied French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese in some detail. Those Romance languages had introduced me to the concept of gender: nouns in those languages are either masculine or feminine, and adjectives change endings to agree with the gender and number of the noun. Polish has that too, whereas English nouns have no gender.
Polish is the first foreign language I have studied, apart from a little Latin as a child, that has grammatical cases. Cases show the job a noun (a person, place or thing) is doing in a sentence, and they are found in German, Latin, Russian and Polish grammar.
It so happens that Polish has more cases than German: the World Atlas of Language Structures counts 4 for German and 6 to 7 for Polish.2 Polish has 3 genders (five, by some counts) and 7 cases. The mind map I had built when learning Romance languages would only get me so far.
I could already tell that mastering Polish cases was going to be my hardest challenge.
I have been learning Polish now for 6 months. What I wish I knew at the start was that there are conventions for when to use each case. For example:
The Location Case (Miejscownik / Locative) expresses where something is statically located (e.g., in a city, in a coffee, on a table). Handy for language learners, there is a trigger for this case: the common prepositions w (in) and na (on), when they say where something is. You have to remember that the noun ending changes to show location, answering the question, where is the thing located?
Example 1: Mleko jest w kawie. (The milk is in the coffee.) Kawa changes to kawie after the preposition w (in) to show where the milk is.
Example 2: Mieszkam w Warszawie. (I live in Warsaw.) Warszawa changes to Warszawie because it describes a static location inside the city.
Back to assessing Polish’s difficulty.
How hard is Polish compared with other languages?
The US State Department’s National Foreign Affairs Training Center teaches languages to US government employees. Its language training page sorts foreign languages into 4 groups by how long its students usually need to learn them, from languages close to English, to languages exceptionally difficult for native English speakers.1
- Close to English, 24 to 30 weeks: Italian and Portuguese take 24 weeks, French and Spanish take 30.
- The second group, about 36 weeks, includes German.
- The “hard languages” (about 44 weeks) include Polish, Russian, Czech, Slovak, Ukrainian, Finnish, Hungarian, Turkish, Hindi, Thai and Vietnamese, among others.
- The “super-hard languages” (88 weeks) include Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and Korean.
The page gives one figure for the whole third group, so it does not try to differentiate whether Polish is typically found to be harder to learn than Russian. It says only that the US State Department groups them together. By its figures, Polish takes about one and a half times as long to learn as French or Spanish, and nearly twice as long as Italian or Portuguese.
It’s worth remembering that these are the US State Department’s own estimates from teaching government employees, and the page gives no method or data. It also says the real time varies with a student’s natural ability, earlier language learning and time in class. I treat the figures as a rough guide to how languages compare. They are not a forecast for any one learner.
How long does it take to learn Polish?
The US State Department’s answer is about 44 weeks, and it measures one particular goal. It is the time its students usually need to reach level 3 in speaking and listening on the government’s own proficiency scale, which runs from 0 to 5 and calls level 3 “General Professional Proficiency”.3 At that level a speaker is deemed to be able to effectively take part in most formal and informal conversations on practical, social and professional topics.
This is also full-time study. A typical week on the US State Department’s timeline is 23 hours in class and 17 of self-study. That makes 40 hours a week, so 44 weeks comes to about 1,760 hours in all.1
Your reasons for learning Polish will set your own goals, and the US State Department gives no indication of how many hours a learner would require to reach a lower level of proficiency. I have found no source that does. Two things a conversation needs are words and speaking practice, and I write about them in How many words do you need to have a conversation? and Why can I understand a language but not speak it?
If 44 weeks makes you wonder whether a translation app would do instead, I give my opinion in If translation apps are this good, why learn Polish for your partner’s family?
What makes Polish hard?
To expand on the case and gender discussion above, I think of the difficulty as sitting in 4 places: the endings, the sounds, the verbs and the words.
The endings
English mostly shows who did what by word order. Polish also changes the end of the word. In the World Atlas of Language Structures, English nouns fall in the group with 2 cases and Polish nouns in the group with 6 to 7.2 So Polska (Poland) becomes do Polski (to Poland) and w Polsce (in Poland), and when you ask for a coffee, kawa becomes kawę in Poproszę kawę (a coffee please).
Even the verbs carry an ending that tells the listener about you. A woman says zarezerwowałam (I reserved) and a man says zarezerwowałem, because the Polish past tense agrees with the speaker’s gender.
In 1998 Vera Kempe and Brian MacWhinney tested adult English speakers learning Russian or German.4 Of those 2 languages, Russian has the more complex case system, yet learners used its endings earlier, because Russian endings almost always give reliable clues to who did what. Worth noting that study was on Russian and German, not Polish, and it tested understanding with a computer task, not speaking. My reading, not the authors’, is that endings are best learnt inside whole phrases, as I suggest above, and in How to learn Polish to talk to your partner’s family.
The sounds
In a 2003 description of Polish sounds for the International Phonetic Association, Wiktor Jassem calls Polish a “consonantal” language.5 No kidding. In my experience, English speakers are quickly bamboozled by Polish’s rich set of consonants (a famous Polish poem starts: “W Szczebrzeszynie chrząszcz brzmi w trzcinie”, meaning in Szczebrzeszyn a beetle buzzes in the reeds).
Polish allows heavy consonant clusters at the start of a word, as many as 5 consonants in a row, as in z pstrągiem (with the trout). The initial clusters are not simplified in fluent speech.
Three different “s” sounds separate words: kasa (checkout), kasza (groats) and Kasia (a girl’s name). Szczęście (happiness, or luck) looks like a jumble of consonants until you can say it.
The verbs
Present and past tenses work a bit differently in Polish than in English. Many everyday Polish verbs come in pairs, one for an action in progress, and one for a finished action. Linguists refer to how an action unfolds over time as a verb’s “aspect”. So, Polish has “aspect pairs”: Robić (to do, in progress) and zrobić (to do, finished) are a pair. Co robisz? (What are you doing?) uses the first. Co zrobisz? (What will you do?) uses the second.
The words
I find Polish a challenge because most of its vocabulary is very different to English. When I learnt głodny (hungry), all I could remember a few hours later was that it began with a “g”. I wrote about that, and the memory hook I used for it, in Why do I keep forgetting new words in a language?
Is anything about Polish easy?
Yes, a few things.
Polish has no a or the. The World Atlas of Language Structures lists English as having both and Polish as having neither.2 Poproszę kawę (a coffee please) and Poproszę rachunek (the bill please) have no word for “a” or “the”.
Spelling follows rules. Jassem describes the link between spelling and sound as quite complex but regular, with highly predictable rules.5 I can personally attest that, once you know the rules for spelling in Polish, spelling tells you how a word sounds.
Where the stress falls in a word is predictable too. In Polish the stress usually falls on the second-to-last syllable, with some exceptions.5
Thankfully, certain words also look familiar to an English speaker: telefon (phone), restauracja (restaurant) and komputer (computer).
Does it matter which languages I already speak?
Yes. The US State Department lists earlier language learning among the things that change how long its students take.1 That also makes common sense: if you only speak English, you’re trying to learn Polish off a limited and different language mind map. The US State Department’s groups are described in terms of English, so if your first language is Czech or Russian, those groups don’t describe you, and I have no source for how much the groups might change.
Is Polish related to French, Spanish or Italian?
Only distantly. French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese all descend from Latin. Polish belongs to the Slavic branch of the Indo-European family, and to the West Slavic group within it.6 Among the larger languages it is most closely related to Czech and Slovak, and its closest living relative is Kashubian. Russian and Ukrainian are East Slavic, and Serbian, Croatian and Bulgarian are South Slavic, so they are more distant cousins.
Latin still left its mark. Poland took up Western Christianity in 966, and with it the Latin alphabet, where Russian and Ukrainian use Cyrillic. Polish then added extra letters (ą, ć, ę, ł, ń, ó, ś, ź, ż) and letter pairs such as cz, sz and rz to fit its own sounds. Latin was also the official language of the Polish state for a very long time, so Polish borrowed Latin words such as edukacja (education), kultura (culture), prezydent (president) and uniwersytet (university).6 Even so, the grammar is Slavic.
Where do I start?
With 3 things:
a) The alphabet and its sounds, before words. I explain why in How to learn Polish to talk to your partner’s family, and it is why the Lumessa app has an alphabet section for each language, with audio for every letter and letter pair.
b) Words from your own life: your family, your kitchen, your journey to work, alongside the most common words. I explain how to choose them in How many words do you need to have a conversation?
c) The endings, learnt inside whole phrases such as do Polski (to Poland) and w Polsce (in Poland), so the ending arrives with the words that call for it.
The words you need to learn depend on who you want to talk to, and what you want to talk about. This is why the Lumessa app asks why you are learning: family and heritage, someone you love, travel, work or study, or simple curiosity. Your most useful vocabulary is taught first.