How to learn Polish to talk to your partner’s family
In short
- Make the language familiar: learn the alphabet and its sounds first, before words and phrases.
- Then choose words in three ways: the most common ones, the ones you meet in daily life, and the ones tied to the culture.
- Aim to think in the language rather than translate from English, and learn grammar through usage, not abstract rules.
- Repetition makes words stick, whether it comes naturally, from flashcards or from a lock screen widget.
Are you interested in learning Polish to talk to your partner’s family?
After 20+ years of language learning experience across five foreign languages, I have some ideas and opinions about what works in language acquisition.
In essence, I believe to learn a language effectively, you need to make it familiar. I like to do this by first learning the alphabet and pronunciation, then focusing on a) the most common words generally, b) the words you encounter in everyday life and c) culturally specific words. Of course you do have to practise.
You also have to learn to think about grammar like a native speaker: through usage, not with abstract-sounding rules. In time, the aim is to “think” in the target language, as opposed to thinking in English and then translating in your head.
My reason
I’m British: I grew up just speaking English, and my wife is Polish: she grew up just speaking Polish. We first met in London, and her English was already proficient after years of school lessons, reading English novels and speaking practice with online tutors. My Polish was… non-existent.
Aged by this time in my early 30s, as a languages graduate I had studied French, Spanish and Italian for my university degree. I felt confident, having a good command of those languages.
But I knew enough about Polish to feel a challenge brewing. Polish has a notably trickier grammar, with three genders (five, by some counts) and seven cases, than the languages I was used to. My Romance language mind-map would only get me so far. I would have to roll up my sleeves.
My language-learning journey
I reflected on my language-learning experience. Like many Brits, the first foreign language I encountered was French, which I started at age 7 at primary school. As a small child, I remember barely understanding the concept of a foreign language. Everyone I knew spoke English; what was the relevance of this tricky subject people called French?
Despite feeling no particular affinity to foreign languages as a child, I later attended a grammar school with a language specialism, housing a large, dedicated language learning centre where my first year classroom was located. Surrounded by foreign language speakers, at age 11 I was transfixed – speaking a foreign tongue was like a magic trick, and I wanted to master it!
French lessons were soon joined by Spanish lessons, around age 13. Spanish felt more different to English than French, with its glottal “j” and upside-down question marks (¿) and exclamation marks (¡).
By 16, I thought I had a knack for languages and I liked a challenge, so I took up Italian too. At age 18, I had achieved a basic level of conversational fluency but felt like I still had a lot to learn, so decided to pursue a degree in all three.
Then, having gained a degree and feeling the travel bug, I attended a Portuguese language school in Rio, Brazil for a few months before starting work.
Learn the alphabet and pronunciation first
At school, I noticed that certain friends would get Spanish and French bitterly confused. I started to notice that I didn’t. At least, not as much. Admittedly French and Spanish are closely related languages, but they sound completely different. I naturally paid close attention to the sound of each language. Every language has a sound, a melody and a pace, and you have to learn to hear it, and then to replicate it.
I would actually go further and say you have to learn to feel it. That begins with paying close attention to individual letters, and learning to pronounce the entire alphabet, as close to a native speaker as possible.
It’s easy to feel like a child again, reciting an alphabet to a song. But rushing or skipping this step is a giant mistake. In my opinion, you have to dwell here and really develop an ear for the language before trying to learn words and phrases.
And remember, accents on foreign letters might look incidental to an English speaker, but forget the accent and the spelling is wrong, the pronunciation awry, and you might even end up with a word with a completely different meaning!
Focus on the most common words, the words you encounter, and cultural words
It can feel daunting trying to learn a foreign language. There are thousands of words. A grammar system. You need near-instant recollection to gain fluency. And a language like Polish, for an English speaker, is quite alien sounding. Where do you even begin?
You start at the beginning, and you take one step at a time. But I found 3 helpful tricks to speed things along.
The most common words generally
The first one was frequency dictionaries. I discovered these while at university, searching for initial vocabulary lists for Italian.
A frequency dictionary simply orders a language not by the alphabet, rather by the frequency that individual words appear in natural language.
Finding frequency dictionaries felt like an amazing shortcut to basic fluency. Research on English found that the 1,000 most common words make up roughly 75% of the words in a typical written text, and the 2,000 most common about 80%.1 Surely, any sensible learner would start there.
Of course knowing words is not enough; you have to have a grasp of grammar too. But understanding 75% of the words on a page is a very solid foundation indeed.
Words you encounter
The second helpful trick I learned during my third year of university, abroad in Spain. It is this: prioritise learning the words you encounter in everyday life.
I was rummaging around the kitchen of my shared flat looking for a frying pan, when my Peruvian flatmate came in. He asked me what I was looking for and, tongue-tied, I realised my university vocabulary might have prepared me to discuss geopolitics, but it had neglected to teach me the word for “frying pan” (it’s la sartén, by the way)!
In Poland, no visit to the in-laws is complete without encountering herbata (tea), kawa (coffee) and pierogi (dumplings). Learn words as and when they surface.
Cultural words
The third trick is to remember that to learn a language is to learn a culture. Cultures have key words, phrases, places and dishes. Pay most attention to these: in Poland the Polish word for “Warsaw” (Warszawa) is going to come up more often than the Polish word for “Rome” (Rzym). Equally, in Italian, learn the word for “Rome” (Roma) before “Warsaw” (Varsavia).
These are the insights that informed the structure of the word bank for each language in the Lumessa app. For each language, I looked at the most frequent words, programmed the algorithm to surface vocabulary sooner which is tied to your reason for learning (for example, family words if you choose “Family & heritage” as your reason for learning), and each word bank’s vocabulary is tailored to the country and culture in question (Polish includes barszcz, “borscht”, but Italian does not).
How to think in a language (never translate)
A mistake that monoglots make is thinking that speaking a foreign language just involves coming up with a sentence in English and then translating it into the foreign language in your head.
The reality is that successful polyglots, or people speaking several languages, actually do start to think in the foreign language. This means they construct sentences idiomatically, from scratch, in the foreign language. They do not think of a sentence in English and then consider how it might be translated to Polish. That’s a beginner’s work.
If you are wondering whether a translation app could do the job instead, I give my opinion in If translation apps are this good, why learn Polish for your partner’s family?
It sounds like a harder process, but in the long run, it’s easier to speak Polish fluently if you learn to think in Polish. You’re rewiring your brain to produce thought directly in the foreign language, in grammatically native ways. I will say this is partly a byproduct of increased fluency, but it is also a skill you can start to consciously train.
This is why many language learning tools show you a picture of a carrot to accompany the word marchewka. It’s to try to get your brain to tie the word marchewka directly to the image of a carrot.
It’s why I find it easy to remember the Polish grzyb (“mushroom”) after going mushroom picking through local forests with my Polish grandparents-in-law.
Actually practise what you learnt
Once you first encounter a word, something has to make it stick. The “something” is repetition, which ideally is organic (every morning in Poland, you come downstairs to the kitchen for kawa), but it can be artificial (flashcards, or, like the Lumessa app, a lock screen widget on your phone showing vocabulary you’re learning).
Learn grammar through usage, not with rules
I mentioned at the start of this article that part of the reason Polish is considered a difficult language to learn is because it has 7 cases. I look at the rest of the difficulty in Is Polish hard to learn? An honest answer. I hadn’t thought about grammatical cases since Latin lessons aged 9, 10 and 11, so all I knew was that they were situationally determined and that they generally complicated a language’s grammar.
What I did not realise until further study of Polish was that native speakers remember cases through usage. In other words, a child pattern-matches their way to the correct use of Polish grammar. They do not run through declension tables or consider formal case names, and nor (ultimately) should you.
It’s far better to remember the mental framing of, for example: who? what? → use the nominative case; and of whom? of what? or missing whom or what? → use the genitive case. This is what native Polish speakers do.
They also link certain prepositions with certain case endings. For example, when a native speaker hears or thinks the word do (“to” or “into”), the brain automatically opens a mental pathway that can only accept a genitive sound profile, with endings like -a, -y, -i and -ów.
Get a feel for the language
With practice, you get a feel for the language: how words sound, what words are, then how to build a sentence, how to capture a thought or an idea. Then, with practice, speaking becomes faster and more effortless. That is the path to fluency.