Polish pronunciation: 57 minimal pairs to listen to

English has one “sh” and one “ch”; Polish has three of each — hard, soft and without the hiss. That is why the first of the 14 groups below are hissing sounds. Then come y, the nasals ą and ę, ł, ch and the endings, where you hear case and gender — and where English habits of mumbling the end of a word cost the most.

Each group first says what an English speaker does instead; the words underneath are the evidence.

What happens here: The s is no trouble: it is the English s of “bus”, always voiceless, even between vowels, where English often lets it buzz (“rose”, “easy”). kasa has the hiss of “kasser”, never the buzz of “causer”. The sz is a “sh”, but harder and further back than the English one: the tongue tip rises towards the ridge behind the teeth, the tongue body stays low, and the lips are not pushed forward. An English “sh” with rounded lips already drifts towards the soft ś, which is the next group’s problem.

What happens here: English has one “sh”, and it sits between the two Polish ones, so to a Polish ear it sometimes sounds like the one and sometimes like the other — and proszę, please, turns into prosię, a piglet. For the hard sz, keep the tongue low with the tip raised and the lips neutral. For the soft ś, press the middle of the tongue up against the roof of the mouth, with the tip behind the lower teeth and the lips spread as for “ee”: a “sh” with an “ee” inside it, as in a quick, whispered “sheep”. Before a vowel it is written si, and the i is not a sound of its own.

What happens here: What holds for sz and ś holds here with a t in front. English “ch” in “church” lies between the two Polish sounds, and the little question word czy merges with ci, to you. For cz, the tongue stays low and hard, and the vowel after it is the dark y; for ć, the middle of the tongue presses against the palate, and it sounds like a very soft “ch” as in “cheap” said with a smile. At the end of a word the difference is often grammar: płacz is crying, płać an order to pay.

What happens here: The sounds themselves are easy for an English speaker; what goes wrong is reading. cz looks like a hard c plus a z, and is read as “k” or “ts” — then czary, magic, becomes something like “tsary”. It is a full “ch” as in “church”, a hard one, with the tongue low. sz is the same sound without the t in front. When reading slowly, think “t” at every cz, and keep the tongue off the roof of the mouth at every sz.

What happens here: English knows the difference between s and z — “sip” and “zip” — so this is mostly a matter of trusting the letter. Polish s never buzzes, not even between vowels where English spelling often hides a z sound (“nose”, “busy”); Polish z always buzzes, as long as nothing voiceless follows. koza, goat, sounds like “cosa” with the buzz of “zoo”. The same goes for the soft sounds: ś without voice, ź with it, and śle, he sends, stands against źle, badly. At the end of a word, however, every z loses its voice — that is a separate rule.

What happens here: English has the sound of ż, but only in the middle of words — “measure”, “pleasure”, “vision” — and almost never at the start. So at the start of a word an English speaker reaches for the j of “jam” or for a plain z, and żona, wife, becomes zona, a zone. Start from “pleasure”: hold the sound in the middle, then put it at the front of the word. rz sounds exactly the same and is only another spelling: nobody can hear the difference between morze and może, sea and maybe.

What happens here: An English reader sees an r and says one — the English kind, with the tongue touching nothing. The Polish r is a tap or a short trill with the tongue tip, like the Scottish r or the tt in American “butter” said hard. And rz is not an r at all: it sounds like ż, the middle of “pleasure”, and after a voiceless sound even like sz (przy sounds like “pshy”). Endings hang on this difference: dobrze, well, against dobre, good; starzy, old men, against stary, old. British speakers have one more habit to drop: an r before a consonant or at the end of a word is always pronounced — park, teatr.

What happens here: English has no nasal vowels, so an English speaker either leaves them out or turns them into a full n. Leaving them out is the real trap: kąt, the corner, becomes kot, the cat. ą is an o with air escaping through the nose, as in French “bon”; before t, d, c, cz and dz it becomes o plus a short n (kąt sounds like “kont”), before k and g o plus “ng” as in “song”, before p and b o plus m (ząb). ę is the same with e: pięć, five, sounds roughly like “pyench”, piec, the stove, has no nose at all.

What happens here: This is where English habits cost the most. English reduces almost every unstressed final vowel to a murmur — the a of “sofa”, the e of “the” — and Polish keeps its grammar in exactly those vowels. kawa is coffee, kawę coffee as an object (piję kawę), kawą “with coffee” (z kawą). Say every final vowel full and clear, as if it were stressed. Final ę is worn down to a plain e in everyday speech — Poles hardly hear it either — but final ą stays audibly nasal, an o with an “ng” colour: robią, they do, against robię, I do. If you cannot hear the ą, you lose the person.

What happens here: Here an English speaker has an advantage: ł is exactly the w of “wet”, a sound German speakers have to learn. The only trap is the eye — ł looks like an l, and a reader who says l says another word: laska is a walking stick, łaska is grace; lata are years, łata is a patch. And the Polish l is always the clear l of “leaf”, never the dark l at the end of English “full”, even at the end of a word: bal. Since almost every past tense contains a ł (był, miała, bał), getting it right pays off in every story you tell.

What happens here: Two sounds at once decide the grammar here: ł against l, and the dark y against the bright i. były is said of women, children and things, byli as soon as a man is in the group. In a sentence you hear the difference only at this one word ending, so it has to be clear: “bywuh” against “bylee”, roughly. English speakers usually get the ł right and the vowel wrong, because English unstressed vowels all drift towards the same murmur.

What happens here: Polish i is the “ee” of “see”, but short. Polish y is close to the i of “sit” or “kit”, said with the tongue pulled a little further back — a sound that is neither “ee” nor “oo”. An English reader sees a y and either says “ee”, as at the end of “happy”, or treats it as the consonant of “yes”; both lose the difference between być, to be, and bić, to hit, or between my, we, and mi, to me. A useful check: my rhymes roughly with the start of “mitt”, mi with “me”.

What happens here: English has no sound for ch outside the Scottish “loch” and a few borrowed words like “Bach”. So an English speaker either says k — and chory, ill, starts to sound like kory, of the bark — or a soft breathy h that disappears in a fast sentence. Make a k, but don’t close the gap completely: let the air rub through at the back of the mouth, as if clearing your throat gently. h is pronounced the same way in standard Polish.

What happens here: Both are soft, so the tongue is in the same place; the only difference is the little t in front of ć. English speakers tend to hear both as “sh” or both as “ch”, and to read ci as the “see” of “city”. Think of si as a soft “sh” with an “ee” in it, and of ci as the same with a t in front — the beginning of “cheese” said with a smile. sień, a hallway, and cień, a shadow, should sound like “shen” and “chen”, both soft.