Myth or Not: Is Polish Really Hard to Learn?

Many of us have heard many times that the Polish language is one of the most difficult in the world to learn. But is it the case? Let’s try to figure this out.

First of all, learning a new language is always a challenge. We need to prepare ourselves for a bunch of unknown words, collocations, expressions, etc. The Polish language isn’t an exception. It embraces the same amount of vocabulary as all the other tongues.

What makes Polish a hard language to learn

Grammar

But to judge how hard the Polish language is to learn, let’s compare it with another one. Let’s make it easy and confront it with English. What’s more difficult in Polish than English? The first thing is that in Polish, the verb is conjugated by persons. We say “ja idę (I go),” “ty idziesz (you go),” “on idzie (he goes).” It may be a bit tricky for a new learner, as we’ve got six persons—three singular and three plural, and thousands of verbs to remember. In English, we just need to switch person, and the verb stays the same (except third-person singular, of course). However, Polish is not the only language with this rule, so it’s nothing unprecedented.

Unique letters

The second thing is that there are some Polish letters that are unique to this tongue. Again, it’s nothing exceptional as there are plenty of languages with their own letters. Nevertheless, those in Polish can be extraordinarily hard to spell. Letters such as “ś,” “ć,” “ź” or “ż” are one of a kind. Sometimes, it takes weeks for a student to master their pronunciation. What’s worse, there are words in Polish that are composed almost entirely of those unique Polish letters. “Żółć” (a bile) can be an example.

What makes Polish easier to learn

Pronunciation of the letters

Those are the two toughest factors each person willing to learn Polish needs to take into account. There are, however, also elements that make Polish easier. When it comes to said pronunciation, each letter is always pronounced in the same way. We’ve got situations in English when we need to pronounce a letter differently, depending on a word or context. For example, the letter “c” sounds different when we say the alphabet and different in the words “castle” or “case.” Or, we need another letter to start the word “cat” and another to start the word “kitten,” even though they’re both pronounced as “k.” In Polish, “c” is always “c,” and “k” is always “k.”

In English, we have even situations in which we pronounce words differently, although we write them identically. The word “read” sounds different in the present tense and in the past tense. We don’t have such cases in Polish. If we see a letter, we can always be sure that we pronounce it in the same way.

To sum it all up, it can be seen that Polish is indeed difficult, especially for beginners. However, after overcoming the initial problems explained above, it turns out that learning Polish isn’t that scary. The level of its difficulty is the same as all the other tongues. Every one of them has its own uniqueness and beauty, making it unrepeatable.