🇵🇱 The best websites for learning Polish

Culture.pl, run by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute, explains the Polish alphabet letter by letter in English, including the sounds that terrify newcomers — ś versus sz, ć versus cz, the nasal ą and ę — with cultural asides that make it stick. Read it on day one, before you attempt any vocabulary. It is a single article, not a pronunciation course, so follow it with recorded audio practice.

The state certification of Polish as a foreign language is what counts for citizenship, university admission and many employers, and this NAWA-run site carries the exam calendar, the list of examination centres worldwide, registration and the official format information. Even if you never sit it, the published requirements are a useful map of what each CEFR level means in Polish. Information only — no teaching material, and mostly in Polish.

A long-standing free site that walks English speakers through the Polish alphabet and pronunciation rules, then the cases, tenses and conjugation, with everyday vocabulary and phrase sets alongside. The pronunciation section in particular is where most beginners should start with Polish. It is static reference material — no exercises, no feedback, and it does not go far past B1.

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 materials bank built by Polish-as-a-foreign-language teachers: printable grammar and vocabulary worksheets, ready-made lesson plans and student handouts, all free to use as long as you credit the source. Self-studiers can mine it for practice on exactly the topic they are stuck on. It is a pile of resources rather than a path — you have to know what you need, and much of the site is in Polish.

A publicly funded platform offering structured distance courses in Polish, a full grammar guide and a basic dictionary with recorded pronunciation, with the interface available in ten languages including German, Czech, Ukrainian and Russian. Completely free with a simple sign-up, and the non-English interface languages make it a rare good fit for learners who aren't coming from English. Coverage stops around B1 and the platform is fairly plain.

A collaborative, Creative Commons-licensed corpus you can search for real usage of a word or download in bulk to build your own decks. It is the raw material behind Clozemaster and countless Anki decks rather than a study tool in itself. Sentences are contributed by volunteers, so quality and naturalness vary — prefer sentences from native contributors and cross-check anything surprising.

Over 100 language editions; the English edition alone has millions of entries covering hundreds of languages, with IPA, declension and conjugation tables, etymologies and usage notes that commercial apps usually paywall. The etymology sections are quietly one of the best vocabulary-retention tools available. Being crowd-sourced, coverage is uneven and rare entries can be wrong — cross-check anything unusual against a native-language dictionary.

Type a word or phrase and it plays back real YouTube clips of people saying it in context, across 25 languages plus sign languages, so you get natural intonation and regional variation rather than an isolated dictionary recording. Free, donation-supported, no account needed. Complements Forvo: Forvo for single words, YouGlish for phrases and prosody.

A browser extension plus web reader covering 100+ languages: click a word or drag across a phrase, get an inline translation, and it becomes a flashcard automatically. The free tier gives unlimited single-word translations but caps phrases and AI explanations at 10 a day; Premium is $6/month. Simpler and cheaper than LingQ or Migaku if all you want is frictionless reading of articles and ebooks.

A detailed staged roadmap for acquiring a language through massive comprehensible input — what to do at each stage, when to start output, how to mine sentences — with a free tracker, starter courses and an active Discord. The roadmap and community are free; vocabulary decks, advanced courses and coaching are paid. It is opinionated to the point of dogma about avoiding early output and translation, so take the framework and ignore the purity rules if they do not fit your goals.