Hey! I’m working on some practice materials for people preparing for Polish language exams, mainly TELC B1/B2 and Certyfikat Polski, and I’d love to get feedback from learners who are currently studying for one of these exams.

At the moment, I’ve put together two full TELC mock exams covering listening, reading, grammar, writing and speaking, and I’m also working on materials for Certyfikat Polski.

What I’m mainly trying to understand is whether the tasks feel close enough to the real exams and whether the feedback on writing and speaking is actually useful.

If you’re preparing for TELC or Certyfikat Polski, I’d be really interested to hear which parts are hardest to practise and what you feel is missing from the resources currently available online.

I’ve attached a short recording showing what I’ve been working on.

Any honest feedback would be really helpful.

Good morning everyone! I am an Italian girl who would like to learn Polish from scratch, as I will need it for my future career. Could you recommend an excellent Polish course for absolute beginners that can be done entirely online?

Jednym ze słów, które trudno mi przetłumaczyć na polski, jest "cimice", którym określa się owada na zdjęciu. Szukając polskiego odpowiednika, znalazłem "zieleniak", "pluskwa", "smrodek" i inne określenia. Stąd moje pytanie: jakiego słowa używacie na co dzień?

Z tego, co wiem

O ile mi wiadomo

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Z pewnością

Niewątpliwie

Bez wątpienia

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Prawdę mówiąc

Szczerze mówiąc

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W związku z tym

Zatem

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Z tego powodu

Ze względu na

Z racji tego, że

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Niemniej jednak

Jednakże

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Mimo to

Mimo wszystko

Mimo że

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Wręcz przeciwnie

Na odwrót

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W każdym razie

Tak czy inaczej

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Poza tym

Ponadto

Co więcej

Oprócz tego

Dodatkowo

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Mówiąc dokładniej

Ściślej mówiąc

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Właściwie

Tak naprawdę

W gruncie rzeczy

Na dobrą sprawę

W sumie

W zasadzie

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Przeważnie

Głównie

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Krótko mówiąc

Jednym słowem

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Ostatecznie

Koniec końców

W końcu

W efekcie

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Do tej pory

Jak dotąd

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Nawiasem mówiąc

Swoją drogą

I have few questions regarding common greetings, in case there is some etymologist here.

1. Why is there no dobre rano? It is pretty common in Europe to say "good morning". Once you cross the border to Slovakia, Czechia, you can hear dobré ráno. There is guten Morgen in German, jó reggelt in Hungarian, доброго ранку in Ukrainian, i tym podobne...

Is there a story behind that?

1. How did dobranoc survive, if dobrydzień supposedly was changed to dzień dobry?

What I've read is, that dobry dzień was contracted into a single word dobrydzień, some people didn't like this, due to the accent falling on the "wrong" syllable, and then popularized the reverse version, dzień dobry. I'm not sure if that is an urban legend, or a true story. But, why not "noc dobra" then? Why is dobranoc OK, but dobrydzień not OK?

And how did they manage to achieve dzień dobry anyways? Is there a book about that? It is not just some nerds changing a the spelling of some obscure technical term, but a common daily greeting, ingrained into millions of people. If I imagine someone trying to that today, e.g. trying to convince people to say noc dobra instead of dobranoc, people would just tell them to f**k off! I could only imagine people changing some basic greeting like this at gunpoint.

Hey! I am learning Polish and built SpeakingMonkey because I wanted a way to practise pronunciation without getting only one score for a whole sentence.

Read a sentence aloud and see every word scored red to green. You can hear a native reference, record yourself, compare both clips, and open a weak word to inspect its syllables and sounds. The Polish library covers A1 to C2. The website is free and works without an account.

SpeakingMonkey

I have tested the mechanics, but I do not yet know whether the result is genuinely useful to Polish learners. If you try one sentence, I would love to hear some feedback, whether it's good or bad, anything would help.

I built the site and received moderator permission for this post. Feel free to give SpeakingMonkey a try, and have fun learning!

Hey everyone,

We're working on a new tool for people preparing for Polish language exams, mainly TELC B1/B2 and Certyfikat Polski.

We're looking for around 10-15 people who are currently learning Polish and would be happy to test it and share honest feedback about what works, what feels confusing, and what's missing.

We'll give free access to everyone taking part in the testing.

If you're interested, leave a comment or send me a message.

Promoting your own app or website is allowed, as long as it's free to use or you're willing to grant some members of the subreddit free access to test your tool. Please contact the moderators before posting to make sure your post will be approved. Posts which haven't been agreed on with the mods beforehand can get deleted.

I have added a new flair for such posts, please make use of it.

This does not mean that you're allowed to spam about your app/website. Please don't post about it again if you have already done so in the past 6 months.

Which one is correct? "na wtorek"? "na wtorku"?

I noticed that weather forecasts tend to use the latter while general news uses the other.

So which one is the correct?

Bardzo zależy mi na tym żeby kogoś znaleźć i po prostu z kimś pogadać o wszystkim i ulepszyć poziom językowy, ewentualnie można spotkać się na żywo, mieszkam w Lublinie.

The freely available frequency lists are usually not great. There were two lists already on Wiktionary, neither cleaned up (e.g. containing duplicates of words with different declined, conjugated forms).

I found some word frequency data here, with license (I believe) compatible with Wiktionary:

https://kwjp.pl/overview

Here is the result: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Frequency_lists/Polish/KWJP

The researchers have already took care counting different declensions/conjugations of a word as one. There still some duplicates, in the sense that e.g. a noun and an adjective might have the same dictionary form, so I merged such examples (as they would link to the same Wiktionary page anyways). I manually removed a lot of proper names(names of cities, common Polish surnames), abbreviations, English words, stuff not interesting for learners. Of course there might still errors, or useless entries, but I think overall this is a pretty clean list, for being freely available.

Hello!

As of today, I have decided to learn a extensively massive amount of A1 to C1 Polish via audio, I also have a custom excersize to use pictures, actions, words to help me learn. I also have a language learning app called Busuu which i highly recommend in general altho my first positive experience was Spanish in it ( it felt more inviting than duo lingo LMAO )

Basically my question is, if I want to conversate with a Polish Person and say I want to rent out your vacation home, what level do i need to be?

I can ask google all i want but I just love the comfort of hearing directly from a Polish Person!

I also want to walk into groccery stores, be able to speak on public transit, and have a basic conversation too

Maybe im throwing myself at a wall by going and learning A1 to C1 but Im going to do this for 30 days straight no breaks, even if I loose sleep while listening to this audio for 24 hours straight.

Some might call me crazy I say i welcome you because I laugh at the fact that I am not fluent now and I have this stupid fear of like not being ready when I get there even tho im sure i can pull by on i think b2 i have no idea dont kill me lmao

Anyways i love Fat Thursday :D

Edit: I forgot to include the fact that all the audio that I listen to will translate each polish word too so im not just training my brain and ears like a muscle but rather also keeping the full knowledge of every word I hear (hopefully)

Hello! I am writing a short film that will act as an educational course for local kids. I want to include some Polish dialogue and was hoping y'all could let me know the proper way to say these things below :) I will include the English line and what DeepL spit out for translation:

"God works in mysterious ways"
Bog dziata w tajemniczy spodob

"Take care of him" (like "handle" the situation)
zajmij się nim

"Oh F$%k" (A Polish phrase that can be translated to when you make a mistake / forget something)
?

"Hello Darling" (meant to be more sinister / sarcastic, not romantic)
cześć, kochanie

THANK YOU for your help

My wife is Polish. Only moved to the US when we got married at 35.

Our daughters are both now bilingual. My wife has done a great job speaking to them almost exclusively in Polish, they can also read and write Polish.

I on the other hand can’t seem to learn. I understand a good chunk of all the household talk from exposure at this point, but the grammar completely eludes me.

Anyone else ever been in this situation? I want to learn more. I’m a native English speaker and it’s the only language I know (besides programming languages which I can switch between at will easily enough).

Thanks in advance!

I’m half Polish and half English. I (18M) have grown up in England my whole life but would go to Poland every summer for at least 3 weeks, which is where I’ve learnt Polish. I can understand a lot but I find it hard to speak and definitely can’t read or write. It’s like my family can understand me but I don’t form proper sentences. I’m annoyed with my Mum for not taking me to Polish school when I was younger. I’ve tried Duolingo but found it quite useless. I’ve heard there’s some good AI tools to learn languages, so was wondering whether they’re worth the money? I plan on moving to Poland when I’m older as I love the country, so I want to get my Polish to a good standard. I’ll try speaking to my Mum in Polish everyday and she bought me some elementary Polish books to help learn years ago but I never used them.

Polish is actually my mother tongue. I was fluent until about 5 years old because i live in the netherlands. My mother is fully polish and in fall break im going to poland to visit my family. I can understand what people say a bit i cant speak it myself. Yes i know i cant learn alot before that but i want to become fluent again and i want to atleast have simple conversations with my family.
(Sorry for my bad english lmao)

(A better version of this old post on r/mathmemes, not mine)

I'm not actually learning Polish, I just thought this sub might appreciate it.

i really want to move to poland is my dream country if i can get any help to gwt know more people i woild like to chat

Hey everyone,

I'm a software developer and I've been building a desktop app called SubSmith for people who learn languages through native videos and audio.

It can take a video/audio file, transcribe it locally, generate subtitles, let you look up words while watching, and export sentences + audio to Anki.

It supports Polish through Whisper, but I don't speak Polish myself, so I'm looking for some Polish learners/speakers who can actually put it through its paces and tell me how well it works with real Polish content.

I've attached a short screen recording of it transcribing a Polish YouTube video so you can see what it does.

From my short testing, the current dictionary struggles with Polish inflected forms, so the lemmatisation step definitely needs some language-specific handling.

In exchange for testing it and giving me some feedback, I'm happy to give 10 people from this community free lifetime access to the app.

If you're interested in testing it, leave a comment and I'll send you the details. Also happy to answer any questions about the app here!

Thanks!

Can someone tell me if the following understanding is correct?

You cannot derive the gender of Plural-only nouns by converting them to singular, eg. Okulary, Spodenki, Wrota. So how do you decline them and change their endings in the different cases? Well in these scenarios, the plural-only nouns "mimic" the declension of regular nouns based on how their plural mianownik (nominative) form ends.

• Okulary (ends in hard -y) mimics masculine inanimate nouns. In the Genitive/Dopełniacz plural, it takes the standard masculine ending: okularów.
• Spodenki (ends in -ki) mimics feminine nouns ending in -ka. In the Genitive plural, it drops the -i and adds a movable 'e' to break the consonant cluster: spodenek.
• Wrota (ends in -a) mimics neuter nouns like okna.(Note: In the singular, -a marks feminine nouns (kobieta, książka). However, in the plural, -a is the standard nominative ending for neuter nouns). In the Genitive plural, it takes the standard neuter zero-ending and shifts the stem vowel o to ó: wrót.