Polish for beginners
If you are starting from zero, you do not need an overview but an order. This page gives you one — six steps, each with its grammar topic, the matching words and a reason why it sits where it does.
Why an order and not a list
This site has 87 grammar topics. For someone just starting out, that is not an offer but a wall: everything looks equally important, and the obvious way in — starting at the top — leads into the tense system before a single sentence is in place.
So the order below is not a sorting of the material but a recommendation, and it follows one rule: every step must make one more sentence possible that you could not say before. Anything that does not — however correct it may be — comes later.
Three things first
- Twenty minutes on six days beats two hours on one. That is not a lecture but the reason this site has a daily goal: revision works through intervals, and you need more than one interval.
- You will not learn pronunciation here. This site explains and tests, both in writing. Speaking and listening are learnt with people or with recordings — the site is no substitute for that and does not try to be.
- Mistakes are the point of practice, not its failure. Whatever you get wrong comes back tomorrow; whatever sticks, only in five weeks. If you only practise what you already know, you do not move forward.
The first six steps
Polish is read exactly as it is written once you know the marks: sz, cz, rz, ł, ą and ę. w is an English v and ł an English w, and the stress almost always falls on the second-to-last syllable — Polska, dziękuję. A few days with the letters, and you can read aloud every word on this site.
To go with it: Greetings and politeness — 43 words.
The first verb is być, “to be”: jestem, jesteś, jest. Jestem z Anglii. — “I am from England.” There is no word for “I” and no word for “a”: the ending says who, and Polish has no articles at all.
To go with it: People and family — 45 words.
Every noun is masculine, feminine or neuter, and the ending usually tells you which: dom ends in a consonant and is masculine, kawa in -a and is feminine, okno in -o and is neuter. The adjective follows it: duży dom, duża kawa, duże okno.
To go with it: Home and household — 35 words.
The easiest conjugation: take off -ć, add the ending. czytać → czytam, czytasz, czyta. mieszkać, pytać, słuchać work the same way, and so does mieć, though its infinitive looks different: mam, “I have”. Now you can say where you live and what you do.
To go with it: The first verbs — 50 words.
To say where something is, Polish puts the noun after w and na into the locative: w domu, w Krakowie, na poczcie. Where English only changes the preposition, Polish changes the end of the noun — often the consonant before it too: Kraków, but w Krakowie.
To go with it: Town and directions — 40 words.
The object goes into the accusative: Piję kawę., Jem zupę. Feminine nouns in -a take -ę, inanimate masculine ones stay as they are (Mam dom.), and animate masculine ones take the genitive form: Mam psa.
To go with it: Food and drink — 45 words.
And after that?
After these six steps you can manage simple sentences in the present and the past, questions and the first few hundred words. That is the point at which an order is no longer needed: from here, the way forward depends on what you need the language for.
All 36 topics of level A1 are on the A1 page; if you would rather practise straight away than read, start with the daily dose — it decides for itself what comes up today.