Polish is the hardest language to learn in the world
What is the hardest language to learn for English Speakers? Take a guess; it is not Chinese or Japanese. It is Polish. Polish has seven cases and Polish grammar has more exception than rules. German for example has four cases all which are logical, seem to have no pattern or rules; you have to learn the entire language. Asia languages usually do not have cases, or at least like that.
Polish – hardest language pronunciation
The Pronunciation is eons harder than Asia language as it usually has long tong twisting consonants. For example a Polish sentence might look like this. Szczebrzeszynie chrząszcz brzmi w trzcinie i Szczebrzeszyn z tego słynie. Wyindywidualizowaliśmy się z rozentuzjazmowanego tłumu.
Further Polish people rarely hear foreign speak their language and with no accent or regional variation than pronunciation must be exact or they will have no idea what you are talking about.
So the next time you have herd someone has learned Polish have some respect. Polish is the hardest language to learn. But the truth is I doubt you will hear a native English Speaker, speak Polish beyond a few phrases. Can it be learned? Yes you can Learn Polish. People do, it just takes humility.
Tags: grammar, hardest-language, language, learn, Polish, Polish-grammar
86 responses to Polish is the hardest language to learn
“I am strong” would be “Jestem silny”
And about the article…
I agree with:
- Polish problems with orthography (which is not hard at all, but many Polish do plenty of mistakes when they write)
- problems with cases – for example: Zagramy mecz? (Will we play a match?) is often changed to “Zagramy mecza?”. In Polish, there are two groups of masculine nouns: żywotne (living) and nieżywotne (unliving). Living are animals and people and their forth case – Accusativus (pl. Biernik) is different than the first case – mianownik. “Mecz” (match) is unliving, and its biernik is like its mianownik. If something is not clear – write to me. My Skype is michaljar2.
-problems with certain words. For example a group of less educated people say “poszłem” (I went). A correct word is “poszedłem”. If you say “poszłem” you will be thought to be stupid.
Luckily, I don’t have problems like these three above. I don’t agree that if a foreigner will use wrong accentuation, a Polish won’t understand him. A standard accentuation is the second syllable from the end. Word “Błyskawica” (Lightning) is pronounced “błyskaWIca” (Bwee-skah-VEE-tsah). Simple. If you accent wrong, it will just sound odd, it won’t be misunderstood.
I also don’t agree that there are more exceptions than rules. For example every regular -ać ended verb’s conjugation is:
-am
-asz
-a
-amy
-acie
-ają
Regular ones are for example: Kochać (to love), wąchać (to sniff), srać (to shit), polać (to pour), grać (to paly), kasłać (to cough) and so on. The only exception that I found is spać (to sleep): spię, śpisz, śpi, śpimy, śpicie, śpią.
Wow, I wrote much
Write to me for translations and particular explanations.
grać is of course “to play”, sorry.
@Greg:
Quite good, but:
Ja wiem ze Polski alfabet uzywa kilka innych literek, ale ja mam angielska klawiature…nie chcialem tracic czasu. Chodzi mi o to, ze mam nie zle pojecie polskiej gramatyki.
—-
It would rather be (Without Polish letters of course):
Ja wiem ze Polski alfabet ma kilka innych literek, ale ja mam angielska klawiature… nie chcialem tracic czasu. Chodzi mi o to, ze mam niezle pojecie o polskiej gramatyce.
Note for Polish learners:
Do tych, co się uczą polskiego: To nie jest trudny język! Uczcie się go! Pod kilkoma względami jest prostszy nawet od angielskiego.
One more thing. Sorry. “Kasłać” is irregular: kaszlę, kaszlesz, kaszle, kaszlemy, kaszlecie, kaszlą
I’m a native Polish speaker, so I didn’t notice. Sorry.
thanks michal!
i’ve heard that is was spelled silna or silne instead of silny.
also, is have faith mieć wiarę .
is that correct?
i’m interested because i am 1/4 polish and am looking to get a tattoo.
silna – fem., e.g. “silna kobieta” – “a strong woman”
silne – neuter, e.g. “silne dziecko” – “a strong child”
silny – masc., e.g. “silny mężczyzna” – “a strong man”
“to have faith” would rather be “wierzyć” (exactly “to believe”). But if you say in English “I believe”, I think that it won’t be the same as “I am a christian”. If you mean that you believe in God, than you can say “wierzę w Boga”. Bóg – God.
Or “I believe that you will pass the exam” – “Wierzę, że zdasz egzamin”. If you have any other questions write because I do not rather visit this site. Today, I just thought that maybe anyone replied, so I did.
english is the hardest language to learn…
the is not hard but much is hard from learn ,i think that ramonia language hard to speaking is because i like it don’t…and the áccenciations is the not easy to learn from heart and you would see the yourself to.
Kasztany z was i pajace. Macie gowniane pojecie o polskim. Kolesie z mojego kraju – nie nawijac tym pierdolom zadufanym co tu wyklepalem. Zaden rozpierdziany slownik im nie pomoze. Niech mnie w rowa cmokna bazyle. W moim pieknym jezyku jest wiecej zajebanych okreslen na cofanie bulgara, niz pozycji w repertuarze indyjskiego fakira. Peace wiggaz.
Learning languages is entirely subjective and the success or failure of grasping an adequate knowledge of any language is based on entirely personal motivations.
There is no way to quantify and measure the difficulty of a language.
Although I am native in Polish I have to admit I had difficulties with understanding slang you write in. Could you please explain what do you mean by “cofanie bulgara” and what kind of poses from “repertoire of Hindu fakir” did you have on your mind?
peace!
Hi. I am from Poland. I can speek polish. I translate it. Cześć. Jestem z Polski. Umiem mówić po polsku. If you wont to learn this language you can.
Well, from my perspective of slovak native speaker, I can tell you without hesitation that Polish, Slovak, Czech, Russian are all on the same difficulty level. Most of the time it is the strange-looking polish script which scares those who are new to the language. All these languages have 7 cases, perfective and imperfective aspect of verbs, 3 genders and so on and so forth. Frankly speaking, I do not get why there is this groundless fear of polish language. Every polish native speaker tends to think that polish is immensely difficult while english is a breeze. Well, I happened to live in the UK for awhile, worked with many Poles out there but their level of english was usually very poor, they had terrible accent and after living in an english speaking environment for a couple of years still struggled with the language. IMHO, english is just as difficult as polish, only you guys don´t know about it yet.
No doubt, Polish language is hard to learn, but as I read your article, you are writing about the pronounciation, and not about grammer. Because Polish is an indo-european language, that means it has a lot of similarities with other european languages, like English, French, Italien, German, not to mention other Slavic languages. But Hungarian is completely different. It absolutely differs from these european languages and although the pronounciation may be easy(er), the grammer is extremely hard. That is why we can learn western languages very hard, and why foreigners can’t learn Hungarian. If you check a Hungarian web page, you can easily check this. Or check a web dictionary. So I don’t say that Hungarian is the hardest language of the world, but – talking about its grammer – a lot harder than Polish.
I’d say impossible to give a definitive answer as it is all relative to teh language you already know. If your native language is Mandarin chinese then it follows that learning another asiatic language will be easier than learning an indo-european language and vice versa.
All languages have their quirks and oddities, 3rd person in English, the lack of perfect and continuous tenses in Hungarian, noun/verb conjugations in German and masculine/feminine usage in French as just a few examples.
There is also the fact that it is easier for some people to learn a language than others just as maths comes easier to some than others. For most people learning a language is a matter of neccesity rather than desire and as such the choice of which to learn is decided for them so Americans tend to learn Spanish, Australians learn Mandarin and British people expect everyone else to speak English
not only is polish the hardest language to pronounce, but to write as well. i am native english but started learning polish when i was 3 years old so grammar comes almost naturally to me .i can guarantee you that if you start learning english as an adult ( and you’re english yourself) , you won’t ever master polish grammar 100% perfectly, even most poles don’t know it perfectly.
About polish isnt the hardest language, look at this
There about 28 forms of the word for number “two” in polish:
dwa, dwaj, dwie, dwoje, dwóch, dwóm, dwom, dwu, dwoma, dwiema, dwojga, dwojgu, dwojg?, dwójka, dwójku, dwójki, dwójce, dwójkiem, dwójko, dwójgo dwojgiem, drugi, druga, drugie, drugiemu, drugiej, drugiego, drugim, drugą
?the question marks mean the website doesnt recognize the symbols
o tak mój język jest bardzo trudny
The Korean terms “Kun-Ahbeoji” or “Mat-Ahbeoji” (both literally meaning “Big Father”) is only reserved for one’s father’s eldest brother.
Say, someone’s father were the third of 5 brothers… They’d call their father’s eldest brother either one of the abovementioned terms, the second eldest “Dooljjae-Ahbeoji” (meaning “Second Father”), the younger brother “Netjjae-Ahbeoji” (meaning “Fourth Father”, notice how third is being skipped here since their father is the third son), and the youngest brother “Maknae-Ahbeoji” or “Qu’t-Ahbeoji” (meaning “Youngest Father”).
If their father’s two younger brothers are unmarried, it’s also acceptable to call them “Sam-Chon” or “Ahjae”. But, they should NEVER call them by either of these two terms once they are married.
Just wondering… does Polish have a lot of dialects within its own language, possibly ones that take some time even for standard Polish speakers to learn or understand?
slovak
silná – “silná žena” – “strong woman”
silné – “silné ďieťa” – “strong child”
silný – “silný muž” – “strong man”
silní – “silní ľuďia” – “strong (more) people”
polish, czech and slovak language are very similar, what do you think?
eng.Speak – pol.kutas
eng.drink – pol.jebac
eng.sit down – pol. wydymaj dupsko
ja nie movia po polsku
I have lived with my polish girlfriend and have been to poland several times and I can barely speak a few sentences. mostly easy stuff.
Bigos, serek wiesky, chleb, zupa orgokowa.
My most commonly used phrase while in poland is nie rozumia lol or pan(i) rozumie po angielsku?
but i do say czesch, dobranoc, dziekuje, dowidzenia
also kocham cie, skarbie, kochana.
Mostly just simple words and phrases but she says my pronounciation is perfect =)
I am an American married to a polish girl 5 years now and have visited PL many times and I do find the language very fluid and pleasing to listen to. I have been able to learn many words but only a few phrases. The problem for me is that there are so many variations of the nouns. If I pronounce something only slightly different they have no idea what I said.
I have a website polishgrammar.com if you want to learn Polish. Its for free. But not only nouns change in Polish, but every word, verbs, pronouns, numbers etc. It is not only the hardest language to learn, but a crazy, chaotic language. However, for me Polish sounds beautiful and it is a very poetic language with a lot of flexibility. You can learn this language, it just takes more time and as a foreigner you do not need to be perfect with the grammar. Just speak it is good enough at first. I think I am pretty good with Polish but I still make mistakes with noun cases.
Michael4010:
You think it’s funny? Would it be funny for you if you said it, for example, to your boss if you worked in Poland?
The polish words he used are very vulgar.
Drina Sobieska:
Yes, there are dialects. There’s a little change in gramatic, the bigger problem is that people use completely different words and sometimes also pronunciation.
About polish language:
next thing i think could be hard is that there are some verbs, which don’t actually have f.eg. present tense. If you want to use present (and usually also continous) tense, you have to usu another, similar but still another word. F. eg.:
przegrywać – infinitive for “to lose” (a game) used for present and all continous tenses (also past and future)
przegrać – infinitive for “to lose” used for past tense and future tense
We use it, because we don’t actually have continous tense – using the right word makes clear for us, what you wanted to say. We divide verbs on two groups: done (“dokonane”) and undone (“niedokonane”).
And there are other strange things…
PS: You think polish is nice to hear? Thanks, I used to think it must seem ugly for foreigner
I am a foreigner, well kind of and Polish sounds like to me very beautiful. It is like nature sounds, soft and a lot of sz, cz, ś, ć, ch, h, rz, ż, ź and other strange sounds that to my ear sound like nature sounds. Like leaves in the fall or wind through a field in the Summer.
I think Polish people are very connected to nature in and the language reflects it.
Now German does not sound nice at all. And Italian which many people like, sounds like people are yelling at each other (but nice). French it sounds like they are talking though their nose. Swedish is ok, kind of musical.
Polish is so unique sounding. This is why Poles generally are good with English as their language is so rich in sounds that they can replicate foreign languages of almost any kind.
Polish sounds very beautiful and rich to a foreign ear. I think it is the best language to learn.
My native tongue is filipino, but I can speak English quite well. I find russian frustratingly harder. For weeks I couldn’t get through the declinations, short-form adjectives, verb conjugations ONLY because of the damn changes in stress-accent. However with polish, despite the fact that it has more rules and exceptions; i find it easier because – almost everthing is pronounced in the penultimate syllable. I’m now able to form complex sentences, including those utilising conditional aspects; but takes me about 5-15 seconds (that’s after a month of studying with me working mon,wed,fri,…. But when I try going back to learning russian, all those stress-changes make everything so damn hard even though the grammar is less complicated…i’d think russian is harder….or maybe because i’m much better in declinations than stress-accents…btw does anyone know a good site (Free.), that can help me more on imperfective and perfective verb forms. It’s my greatness weakness since i have to sometimes argue in my mind which form to use, testing it, and it takes up the most time when i’m mentally building a sentence to speak aloud?
Hi, I am from Poland and I learn English and Germany. I’m 14.
Uczę się tych języków od około 5 lat i sądzę że są łatwe. A Polski czy ja wiem czy najtrudniejszy język?
Ja bym obstawiała ze właśnie Chiński ale jednak nie. Jak dla mnie Polski to najpiękniejszy język;)
Kinga, I am impressed you are 14 and speak or at least are learning three languages.
Many people say Asian languages are hard, because they are so foreign looking. But they are not. I know this child who is part Korean and part Polish. The child lives in Poland and is exposed to Polish 65% more. But prefers Korean because the pronunciation is and structure is easier for the child. In fact the father travels so much that his exposure to Korean is limited but the mother says he things Korean is easier. Why would a child be partial. Polish is much harder than the Asian languages.
Well… I don’t think that Polish language is hardest to learn(I think that probably beacause i’m from poland, but whatever). Theperson, i don’t agree with you English is probably easiest launguage to learn, a lot of people are speaking in english in XXI century. Actually I’m learning speaking in english, German and italian. From these German is hardest… for example in speaking, look you need to have nice accent to speak in this launguage, and from my own experience i know that most of people in this country are lazy in case of teaching english… That’s I wanted to say.
My Girl friend is from Poland and I too face lot of problems as far as Language is concerned. She always tries to teach me but I hardly got anything till now. I think its very different. in fact speaking requires a better and refined tongue which you can only have if you are from Poland. I am from India and know 4-5 national languages from India but learning Polish is the hardest time, I have been. Anyhow, Love has no language which I always tell her whenever I stuck somewhere.
Try to learn vocabulary in the nominative case, rather than Polish grammar. Poles often do not understand truly how hard their language is because they are native speakers.
Try to be fearless and speak Polish even if people laugh. Learn words not phrases at first as it is too hard to learn a whole Polish phrase.
“Well, I happened to live in the UK for awhile, worked with many Poles out there but their level of english was usually very poor”
Mark, perhaps you worked with poorly educated people (the largest part of Polish emigrees to the UK) who did not care to master the language or they were unable to grasp the intricacies of the english grammar. Those who want, do learn.
I think the Polish people speak English very well. In fact, I think Poles can replicate the sounds of the English language very well as their language is very complex. Poles are very educated also. The quote above is not from me.
No, Polish people DON’T speak English very well. Alright, there are some exceptions, but there’s more people which don’t know what is it I am, You are etc. I’m from Poland, i’m 13 and I think that there is too little lessons of English (in schools, of course). You can see it in every touristic country. There are some peoples which cannot speak english very weak or not at all. Our language isn’t so easy – i won’t tell about grama, because it’s totally another topic to talk about. You’re the best if you understand what I wrote – but now you see how english looks in Poland.
Yes if you are from Poland of course you will say that. Polish people do not know their own abilities.
I am an English native speaker and teach English. I also live in Poland and speak Polish. Believe me, Polish people speak English very well. You do not think so as the education system in Poland is really intimidating. But how many people who are 13 could write a post like you on an foreign language website. And Polish is a totally different language than English. English and German or Danish are close, but Polish – wow – you speak English well, believe me.
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