Polish Learning Community and Resources

How to Use Polish Keyboard

Today’s blog post will be a bit different from all the previous ones. I enjoy sharing the facts about my country but today I’d like to give you some homework! Many of you are using our OLS courses to learn the basics of Polish. I hope that by now you’re already quite familiar with Polish orthography and I hope that you can confirm that it’s not as scary as it seems! However, you might wonder how to type all the Polish diacritics on a computer keyboard – I assume that nowadays phone keyboards are very intuitive to use but if you have trouble with that, let me know, and I’ll prepare another quick tutorial. The lack of all the ą’s and ć’s rarely changes a given word’s meaning, therefore in the past, before the smartphone era, the diacritics were frequently omitted. Nowadays, however, we have no excuses and I’m sure that you all want your emails and texts to look proper. 

Those of you who use a regular QWERTY keyboard will be relieved, most (if not all) Polish keyboards produced nowadays use this layout. You’re more likely to come across a QWERTZ keyboard in typewriters. You’ll be relieved again to learn that all the special polskie znaki (lit. ‘Polish signs’, i.e. Polish diacritics), as we commonly call them, aren’t hidden under any special keys. All you need to do is to press the right Alt (Alt Gr) key and the letter you need to modify. For example, to write ą press Alt and A at the same time. If you need a capital letter, add Shift (↑) to the combination, for example, O plus right Alt plus Shift = Ó. At first, it may sound like a little bit too much of ‘gymnastics’ but treat it as a stretching exercise for your fingers, after a few sentences you will get a hang of it and you’ll see how easy it is!  

Now that you know how to use the diacritics on the Polish keyboard, you may need to know where all the punctuation marks are. Here things get a little bit more complicated because this simply depends on what’s your computer keyboard (different countries use different layouts). To make it easier for you, below you’ll find an image with the layout of a Polish keyboard, simply compare it to the keyboard in your language. 

I hope you found this easy! Now you have no excuses and you can immediately try it in our OLS courses quizzes. I am also waiting for you on the ‘Practice your Polish’ forum – go ahead and say hello to everyone in Polish (using the Polish diacritics!).