Polish Learning Community and Resources

Not as Scary as It Seems - Some Things That Make Polish Easy!

Polish has an opinion of being a particularly difficult language. Many learners complain about its pronunciation, orthography and grammar. In this blog post I would like to show you that some of these aspects aren't as difficult as they seem, let's go!

The orthography and pronunciation

I've heard so many times that written Polish looks as if it consists only of consonants! While, indeed, many words may look like there are just too many consonants in a row, the pronunciation is usually slightly easier because some sounds are represented by two letters, for instance, "sz" is pronounced "sh". The good news here is that Polish orthography is unambiguous, once you've learned a handful of rules (and a few exceptions), you will be able to read all the words without problems! 

The pronunciation may appear problematic at first but you will soon realise that there are only a few sounds that are quite difficult. The word stress is very regular and falls (in the great majority of words) on the penultimate syllable, so you don’t need to worry about it also if, by mistake, you stress some words on the wrong syllable - no big deal, this doesn’t affect the meaning of the word, you’ll be understood anyway.

The dialects

Good news! Polish has a very low dialectal variety - it means that throughout the country everybody speaks the same language. The differences in the vocabulary are minor. Unless you go to a very remote village, you won’t have major problems communicating with the locals. Even if you meet people who speak some of the regional languages, they will speak Polish too! Needless to say, the same script (Latin) and the same orthography are used throughout the country.

The grammar

I know that most of you think about the grammatical cases here. Speakers of other Slavic languages will have a big advantage because many of the endings are very similar but as I, hopefully, was able to demonstrate it in my post about Polish cases, they aren't as scary. Unlike in some other languages, the prepositions used with specific cases can help you guess their meaning. Other than that Polish doesn't have many grammatical moods – only three: indicative, imperative and conditional, and all these are very easy to form, so you don't need to worry about them! Tenses are also very easy - there are only three, and they are very easy to form. You basically need to learn only the present and the past participles (again, they’re super easy), once you’ve mastered these, you will be able to immediately form future tense!

What do you think? I hope I convinced at least some of you that Polish is not as scary as it seems! I admit, at first it may seem overwhelming but would you be interested in learning anything if there was no challenge to it at all? As I said in this blog post, some of the difficulties of learning Polish are compensated by the elements that are very easy. As always, let me know your thoughts on the forums, I hope that many of you will agree with me :)