It will probably come as no surprise that Polish is the official language of Poland. With the country having a population of nearly 40 million people the language itself is quite popular.

Of course there are also a number of large Polish speaking communities in other countries across the world including Brazil, Canada, Germany and of course the UK (where it is the second most popular spoken language there).

The Polish Alphabet

As an English speaker who wants to learn Polish one of the first things you’ll need to get to grips with is their alphabet. Unlike languages such as French and German where their alphabet is very similar, Polish has a different set of letters to learn. It is a good idea to learn the alphabet or at least get your head around it a little before you start. Letters you might want to start with include ą, ę, ć, ł, ń, ś, ż, ź.. This does make it hard to learn, but if you start with the alphabet before you go ahead with learning how to form words then you’ll find things much easier.

The of course you have the Polish habit of putting together groups of letters that aren’t usually seen together  – so for example cz, rz, sz, szcz which are all quite difficult to pronounce. Of course this will come in time if you do decide to learn the language but in the mean time you might want to try and avoid words that have these sets of letters in (if you can)

Tongue Twisters

Of course if you want to try and get your tongue around some of these then you could try learning one of the popular Polish tongue twisters that often do the rounds. One of the most popular being W Szczebrzeszynie chrząszcz brzmi w trzcinie i Szczebrzeszyn z tego słynie which means a beetle buzzes in the reed.

A Difficult Language

Unfortunately as languages go, Polish is one of the hardest and most complicated to learn. Of course that doesn’t mean that you should put off of trying altogether it just means that it might  take longer to get your head around it. Not only do you have the alphabet to get to grips with but they have lots of different grammatical rules that you need to learn too, if you want to learn the language fully.