Disclaimer: I’m not a native Polish speaker & I’m not a teacher of Polish.  This website will not teach you Polish, but I hope that by documenting many of the interesting things I’ve found, it will be useful to help others learn Polish alongside other teaching sources.

I started learning Polish in 2016.  I’ve been having regular lessons, trying every learning website and app I can find & buying every Learn Polish book, along with a variety of those in Polish for children.

What I found is that while the books & apps help with some things, they rarely explain things in ways which I found easy to grasp as a non-linguist.  I’m a software developer and learning new things is both trade & hobby.  My brain likes to spot patterns, find rules and establish order amid the chaos.  The traditional way to learn by books & apps is to memorize and learn a lot by repetition.

Some will tell you that it’s necessary to learn this way because Polish is a complex language with lots of irregularities & special cases.  I started by trusting that was true and doing as the books suggested, but the more I read, the more patterns I started to notice.  My approach will not suit everyone, but as I shared ideas, tables and diagrams with others in my class, I found I wasn’t alone in finding a different approach useful sometimes.

There will be exceptions to every pattern and rule.  Maybe a pattern only covers 75% of cases, but if your goal is to be competent in a language you don’t need perfection, you need enough to get to the point where you feel confident to open your mouth and start talking.  The goal is to memorize as little as possible, then apply common rules to what you’ve memorized to fill the gaps when you need it.

As I continue to learn Polish, I will be using this site to share things which I found useful.  It may be different ways to lay out information which I found unclear in books and other websites, or connections between words which allow you to get more bang from your buck for everything you learn..

If you find something useful, can suggest an improvement, or I got something wrong, please let me know.  I’m learning too & while I’ll do my best to triple-check everything, I’m bound to make some mistakes too!  That’s an inevitable part of learning new things, but nothing you should be afraid of!

Dziękuję — Martin