Polish, the national language of the Republic of Poland, is a West Slavic language and is commonly conflated by the average American with Russian. But actually, Polish is closely related to Czech and Slovak, which are also West Slavic languages- much more so than the Russian or Ukrainian languages which belong to the East Slavic language branch.
Polish has over 40 million speakers globally, making it the second most popular Slavic language. The biggest concentration of speakers is located, unsurprisingly, in Poland but there are many Poles living abroad in several European countries and in North America.
West Slavic languages, including Polish, use the Latin alphabet unlike East Slavic languages which use the Cyrillic alphabet. But do not be fooled, despite using the same alphabet system as the English language, the West Slavic languages are generally considered harder to learn for the average native English speaker. Polish and Czech are often credited with being the most difficult to learn. And although the Latin alphabet is used, one still must learn the alphabet of the West Slavic languages at the beginning of their undertaking as the letters make different sounds than the English language. In the Polish language there are also seven more letters than the English alphabet.
Learning Polish is definitely not for the faint-hearted as it can take years to achieve any sense of fluency for the casual learner who is tasked with mastering crazy grammatical rules, all of the exceptions and difficult pronunciations of consonant clusters. However, I am here to make the task *slightly* easier. My goal is to provide learners with an easily understandable but thorough posts to achieve a baseline knowledge of Polish grammar.
Happy learning! 🙂