🇵🇱 Best Polish books for advanced learners

Foreign Service Institute, Peace Corps and DLI materials — full textbooks plus hundreds of hours of audio — are public domain and hosted here for free across dozens of languages. The depth is extraordinary and the FSI Basic courses take diplomats to professional working proficiency, which no consumer app attempts. The recordings are from the 1960s–80s, the drills are relentless, and some vocabulary is dated (Cold War era), so they suit disciplined self-studiers, not casual learners.

Oscar Swan's grammar of contemporary Polish, hosted free by the University of Pittsburgh alongside his first-year Polish lesson materials, is the most thorough English-language treatment of Polish grammar you can get without paying. It is the reference to consult when a learner site's explanation of aspect or motion verbs leaves you unconvinced. The site itself has not been touched in about two decades and looks it — go straight to the PDF.

A public digital library of Polish literature — the school canon plus much more — free to read online or download, with a large catalogue of professionally recorded audiobooks and annotations explaining archaic words. Reading a book while listening to its recording is the classic route into advanced Polish, and here it costs nothing. The catalogue is mostly out-of-copyright classics, so the language is often older than what you will hear on the street.

PROLOG's HURRA!!! series, written by practising teachers, is the course book most Polish language schools build their classes on, running from absolute beginner up to advanced with workbooks, audio and the Testuj Swój Polski exam-practice companion. Following it keeps your self-study aligned with what a class or tutor will assume you know. Written to be taught, so working through it alone is harder than a self-study course, and the books must be bought.