If translation apps are this good, why learn Polish for your partner’s family?
In short
- In the author’s view, an app can carry your words across the table, which is enough for a holiday, a form or a first hello.
- When the author tried live translation with his mother-in-law, the delays at every step made the conversation stilted, and he found no independent test of live translation between English and Polish.
- In the author’s view, a language carries more than the functional meaning of its words, from jeitinho in Brazilian Portuguese to sto lat! in Polish, and a translation leaves much of that behind.
- Two studies suggest that words carry more emotional force in a first language than in a later one, though a second language can make an awkward subject easier to say; the author finds people more candid in their first language.
- Look a word up when you need it, then say it yourself: in the author’s experience, you remember a word you have said in a real moment.
Friends and family ask me “You’re learning Polish? Can’t you just get instant live translation these days?” This raises the related question: “If translation apps are this good, why learn Polish for your partner’s family?” Writing in September 2026, I believe that live translation apps only solve part of the communication problem, and still leave a lot to be desired in terms of speed and functionality. You still need your phone and, I expect, an Internet connection, and there is still a delay. For a holiday, a form or a first hello, that is fine. For people you will sit with again and again, and a culture and language you want to understand deeply, I think it is worth being able to say at least a few things yourself.
How much of the Polish language is worth you learning depends on a) whether any of your Polish family can speak English (and to what degree), b) how often you will be at the same table, and c) how deep you want those conversations to be.
Using a translation app doesn’t mean you are lazy or a bad partner. It is the right tool in plenty of situations, and I indicate a few below.
My experience
Let’s focus for a moment purely on the practical problem of communicating ideas.
I am British and I grew up speaking English. My wife is Polish, and I am learning Polish so that I can talk to her family, including her grandparents.
I recently sat down for a chat with my mother-in-law. She speaks only Polish, and my Polish is not at a conversational level. To communicate, we used the Google Translate app on my iPhone, on the “live translate” conversation feature. This worked by one person tapping the mic icon on the app, recording a message in their language, the app transcribing what they say then translating into the other person’s language, then the other person reading the translation and tapping the mic to record a response, and so on.
The delays with this method were fairly mind-numbing. Consider the delay at each stage of a) saying something in your language, b) the app transcribing your voice, c) the app loading a translation in the target language (which is not always fast), d) your interlocutor reading the written translation, e) your interlocutor thinking of a response, f) your interlocutor recording that response, g) the app transcribing that response, h) the app translating that response, i) you reading that response. Consider also that this was a quiet conversation between 2 people, not a large group with multiple people talking over each other.
Needless to say, live translation via a phone app proved to be a very stilted way to have a conversation, particularly with someone you have an important relationship with. The delays force both sides to pause, consider, reconsider, edit and maybe even forget some of what immediately comes to mind. I also noticed, with the example language pair of Polish and English, that accuracy in the translation often drifted notably upon transcription, then again upon translation. If you use a common idiom in your language (e.g. “this person has a screw loose”), it might be translated literally or just incorrectly. Either way, you might have no idea what the person you’re talking to actually means.
I have not yet tried the version of live translation which involves compatible earphones translating what someone is saying to you into your own language. I expect this method still has the problem outlined below.
Is a language just a tool for getting things said?
Let’s consider what is lost when we rely on outsourced translation as the solution to a language barrier.
In my experience, monoglots often do not realise that a language is more than just a method of attempting to functionally communicate a thought. Translation is rarely as simple as finding the Polish word for your English word, doing that for every word in the sentence, and building a sentence according to grammatical rules. Many words in English do not perfectly map onto Polish words. Linguists call the study of the meaning of words “semantics”. What you find is that words and concepts may be related in one language, but not in another language. Words may have a certain nuanced meaning in one language, but a simpler meaning in another language. A word may exist for a whole concept in one language, but not in another (consider schadenfreude from German, or umami from Japanese).1 How do you translate that?
A great Brazilian Portuguese word I learnt in my time in Rio was jeitinho. It means finding a clever workaround, creative solution, or shortcut to solve a problem, often by bending rules or cutting corners.2 The thing is, you need a sentence to convey the full idea in English, and you can’t just pick “the English word for that”.
Consider also that jeitinho is the diminutive form of jeito, which means “way”, “manner” or “knack”. So jeitinho is literally “little way”. The grammatical construction of the word conveys part of its meaning. I found certain people used this word all the time to mean a clever little workaround for something they wanted to achieve. Consider that using such a word also tells you something about the person you’re speaking to.
In my experience, learning Brazilian Portuguese taught me nuance like this. In my opinion, a translation app tends to give you an equivalent and leave the nuance behind.
Google Translate is the language-equivalent of someone standing on a mountain top describing the view to you over the phone. In my opinion, Google and other technology platforms are making their description of the view ever clearer and more accurate. But learning the language yourself is to begin to see the view with your own eyes.
Now you can start to understand why it’s frustrating, as a polyglot, when a monoglot asks you why you’re bothering to learn a foreign language.
Is a translation app ever enough?
Don’t get me wrong: translation apps and technology are still a great tool. If you are booking a table, filling in a form or asking the way, you need a functional way to communicate and you may never see the person again. An app can achieve that.
It is also better than silence. If your partner’s grandmother speaks no English and you speak no Polish, a phone on the table is one way to say hello. I would rather see someone try than say nothing.
How good is live earphone translation for Polish?
As of September 2026 I can’t tell you, and I looked. I found no independent test of live translation between English and Polish. One large yearly comparison of translation systems, the WMT25 general task, covered 30 language pairs, and Polish was not among them.3
Google’s help pages for live translate, for iPhone and for Android, list Polish among their languages and describe modes for listening through headphones, for taking turns to speak, and for showing each speaker their own half of the screen. The Android page also lists offline live translation for ten language pairs with English, and Polish is not one of them.4 Apple’s pages say that if the other person has no AirPods of their own, you speak and then show or play the translation on your phone, that in a noisy place you should move the phone closer to the speaker, and that you should check anything important for accuracy.5 The Apple pages I read do not say which languages the feature covers, so I can’t say whether it handles Polish.
What changes when a phone sits between you and their grandmother?
In 2015 Kotaro Hara and Shamsi Iqbal had 23 pairs of people tell each other stories through a prototype speech translator. Like in my conversation with my mother-in-law, the pairs adapted how they spoke and how they listened to make up for its mistakes.6 A word of caution, though. That was a 2015 prototype in a storytelling task in a lab, not Polish and not family, so it shows that people adapt, not how much a family would have to.
What does a translation leave out?
As I touched on above, some phrases perform a job in the room that is bigger than their simple meaning. Sto lat! (happy birthday) literally means “a hundred years”, and it is a wish that the person will live that long in good health and happiness. It is also the name of the song you will hear at birthdays, weddings and any toast worth raising.7 Na zdrowie (cheers, or bless you) literally means “to health”, and it covers both the toast and the sneeze.7 Smacznego (enjoy your meal) literally means “of tastiness”.7
You can look all three up. An app may well give you “happy birthday” for sto lat!. My point is that the meaning is the small part. Knowing when to say it, in what voice, and what the room does next is the rest of it.
My mother-in-law taught me zimno (cold) at Christmas, while we were walking outside, with a brief self-hug and a shiver, and within a few hours I was using it. I wrote about that in Why can I understand a language but not speak it?
Do people open up more in their own language?
Research suggests that words tend to carry more emotional force in a person’s first language than in a language learnt later, though a second language can make an awkward subject easier to say.8 A word of caution, though. The two studies I read measured swearwords, taboo words and childhood telling-offs, not conversations with relatives.
I have always found people more candid and nuanced when speaking their first language, and more functional when speaking a second language. Perhaps this is because most people do not speak a second language as well as their first, so focus more on translating clear, unambiguous concepts. In any event, it’s interesting that the things people say differ with the language they are speaking, and with their relationship to that language.
Can I use a translation app and learn Polish?
In my opinion, the two do not compete. They are complementary. When you need a word you don’t know, you can look it up. I find it best to then say the word out loud, to the person you’re talking to, and not simply let the phone say it for you. In my experience, you remember a word you have said in a real moment. I explain why in Why do I keep forgetting new words in a language?
In my experience, remembering new foreign words works best when you practise going from meaning in English to foreign word: you need to start with the English and produce the Polish.
The “Review” feature in the Lumessa app does this in some of its questions. It shows you the English and asks you to type the word in the target language, because pulling a word out of memory is what makes it stick. Typing is not speaking, so the saying out loud is still up to you.
So should I learn Polish?
As I’m sure you can tell by now, learning Polish is a long-term investment in the relationship. In my opinion, an app is a shallow tool, useful to get something practical done now. Learn some Polish if you will be back, if the people you want to talk to have no English, or if you want them to hear you try. If that is you, I explain where I would start in How to learn Polish to talk to your partner’s family.
If you tell the Lumessa app you are learning for family and heritage, for someone you love, or out of curiosity, it teaches sto lat! (the birthday wish) within your first 20 words.