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Honest Polish Duolingo Review – Can You Actually Learn Polish With Duolingo?

I tested out the Duolingo Polish course for 30 days to see if it’s worth doing. 

This Duolingo Polish review will go into detail on whether I think it’s worth doing the Duolingo Polish course as well as the positives & negatives of the course.

The review is broken up into different sections and I’ve gone into detail on how good Duolingo Polish is in teaching you to speak, listen, read and write in Polish.

Summary

Here I’ve written a brief summary of my thoughts on the Duolingo Polish course. After this summary, I have gone into much more detail into the course, what you’ll learn and more.

Good Things About Duolingo Polish

  • The course has audio clips for every word and phrase.
  • You pick up pronunciation easily and quickly.
  • They introduce relevant and useful words and phrases.
  • Lots of opportunities to practice what you’ve learnt.
  • The course builds on concepts you’ve already learnt whilst introducing new words as you go.

Bad Things About Duolingo Polish

  • Virtually no speaking practice – the course mainly focuses on reading and writing.
  • Explanations on grammar points include lots of jargon and sometimes are difficult to understand.

Would I Recommend Duolingo Polish And Who For?

  • I would recommend using the Duolingo Polish course as an introduction to the language.
  • You won’t be able to learn to speak fluent Polish from this course – that would require a lot of other input such as videos, audio courses, books and more.
  • This course will teach you some basic words and phrases and will also give you an introduction to Polish grammar including verb conjugations and cases.
  • I’d recommend this course for someone just starting out with Polish.

Alternatives To Duolingo Polish

  • There are many other Polish courses out there that will teach you to speak at a fluent level much better than Duolingo.
  • My top recommendation is Pimsleur, an audio course that will get you speaking from day 1. If you’re serious about learning Polish then I’d recommend doing the first lesson on Pimsleur (it’s completely FREE).
  • Another great option for learning Polish is Glossika. Glossika is also an audio-based course that allows you to acquire grammar and vocabulary through complete sentences (rather than memorizing). 

Background Information

Here’s a bit of background information on myself to give you some context to this review. 

I did the Duolingo Polish course for 30 days in a row and each day I did 20 minutes of Duolingo practice. During the 30 days, I did no other Polish courses and only learnt Polish from the Duolingo course.

I’ve never studied Polish before doing this course and I’ve also never studied a similar language such as Czech, Slovak, Russian or Ukrainian.

What Did I Learn In The Duolingo Polish Course?

Having spent 30 days (20 minutes each day) studying Polish with Duolingo, I did actually learn lots of useful vocabulary, verbs, phrases and grammar points. 

So what did I actually learn? 

According to Duolingo, I learnt 427 words in the 30 days. 

Duolingo breaks up the language into different topics and each topic will have a different focus. For example, some of the topics I learnt included food, animals, adjectives, plurals, clothing, family, colors etc. 

Below are some examples of words I learnt:

Girl, boy, man, woman, bread, children, milk, tea, cookies, thank you, please, yes, no, cheese, soup, human, animal, big, small, old, good, hat, coat, dress, mother, father, sister, brother, red, blue, green, who, what, where

Below are some examples of verbs I learnt: 

To have, to speak, to see, to love, to write, to know, to wear, to hear, to go, to need

Below are some examples of phrases/sentences that I learnt:

I am a girl, they have milk, I am eating bread, I speak English, the dog likes milk, the juice is tasty, I love you, I am writing a book, I know those women, you wear a hat, you see that man, he is going to school, we are not going home, I need a horse, my grandmas are old, this woman is my wife, do you have a family?, we are married.

Example Sentence

These are just a few examples of words, verbs and sentences that I learnt during my 30 days on Duolingo. There are plenty more things that I learnt in addition to these. 

Duolingo Features & Teaching Style

Duolingo Polish Course

The Duolingo Polish course has 4 units with 67 different topics. Each topic contains 5 levels with around 5 lessons on each level.

Topic Examples

Tips

Each of the 67 topics comes with a ‘tips’ page.

This is usually just a bit of information about what will be covered in the new lessons and usually explains the grammar points in more detail.

Overall I had mixed feelings about the quality of the ‘tips’ sections.

I found they contained a lot of information (actually way more information than is needed for the lessons) and they often used jargon that I wasn’t familiar with e.g. declension.

It didn’t seem very user friendly for a beginner and I wished they’d explained the grammar points in simpler terms. 

When I took the time to read, breakdown and look up any unfamiliar words I did actually find the page to be really useful and did help me a lot with understanding the lessons. 

It did give lots of examples too when discussing a new grammar point which was really helpful especially when trying to understand some of the more complex rules involved in Polish e.g. cases.

Below is an example from the ‘tips’ explaining accusative endings.

Tips Example

Stories

Stories are a feature of some Duolingo courses where you are given short stories to help your comprehension of the language.

Unfortunately Polish doesn’t currently have any stories which is a shame because in the past I have found these super helpful when doing other Duolingo courses and I do think they are fantastic for improving your comprehension skills.

Podcast/audio lessons

Unfortunately the Duolingo Polish course doesn’t currently have any podcasts or audio lessons. They have introduced this as a feature on some courses but not on Polish yet.

Teaching Style

When doing new lessons on Duolingo they tend to teach you new words/phrases by giving you a few new words often by just asking you to select the correct meaning and showing you a picture to help. 

New Word Example

After that you get a range of exercises to practice including translating from English to Polish and also from Polish to English and also listening to words in Polish and writing it in either Polish or English.

In each new lesson, Duolingo usually introduces a few new words and then uses these words in sentences that you’ve previously learnt in other topics so you can focus on learning the new words.

I found this to be really effective because you can consolidate other things that you’ve learnt and really get to grips with the new words. This is especially good for hard concepts such as Polish cases as you can focus just on the new concept.

Speaking & Listening

Learning Pronunciation

  • The Duolingo Polish course was very good at teaching pronunciation of words.
  • Every single word and sentence included in the course has a sound clip to go with it so you can hear the correct pronunciation of the word/phrase.
  • The audio quality was very good and it sounded like a native speaker.
  • In one of the tips sections for one of the initial topics they included a pronunciation table which showed each letter in Polish and the corresponding sound in English (they also included IPA as well). They gave example words too to make it easier. This was really helpful.
Tips Page
  • I found that the more I practiced and the more lessons I did, the easier pronunciation became.
  • I didn’t spend ages studying the pronunciation chart, instead I did lots of lessons and to be honest the pronunciation just came naturally to me as I practiced more.
  • As you see more words and hear the pronunciation you pick up on the sounds and then when you see new words with the same letters you pronounce them correctly without hearing them first.
  • As an example in Polish, the letter ‘w’ is actually pronounced like the letter ‘v’ in English. It didn’t take me long to notice this and then whenever I saw a new word with a letter ‘w’ in it, I would automatically pronounce it with a ‘v’ sound. 
Sentence Example

Voice Recognition

  • In some Duolingo courses they include voice recognition. This is where a word/phrase will appear on the screen and you have to say the word/phrase out loud into the microphone.
  • Duolingo will then tell you if you pronounced it correctly or not.
  • Unfortunately, the Polish course doesn’t include these types of exercises which is a shame because I have found them to be useful in the past when doing other Duolingo courses.
  • There’s not much opportunity to practice speaking when doing the Duolingo course so it’s a shame they didn’t include them as they really force you to speak out loud.

Fluency in Conversation

  • Fluency or being able to hold a conversation with someone in Polish is probably one of the main reasons that anyone would choose to start the Duolingo Polish course.
  • After doing the course for 30 days, I wouldn’t be confident at all in speaking with someone in Polish.
  • Of course, after just 30 days there’s no way I would ever be at a fluent level but I’d even say that after this short time I wouldn’t be confident at all to say much more than some basic greetings and phrases.
  • One of the main negatives of the Duolingo Polish course is that there isn’t much speaking practice. It’s all reading and writing.
  • The best way to practice speaking is to force yourself to say all the words/phrases out loud as they appear on the screen even if you don’t need to. The more you say the words, the more they will be consolidated in your brain and they’ll come naturally to you later when you try to use them.
  • This is something that you will need to do for yourself though as Duolingo doesn’t ask you or require you to say the words out loud.
  • The lack of speaking practice means that I can’t confidently recall many of the words and phrases that I learnt during the course and say them.
  • I’m quite confident in recognising them when they appear in front of me but recall is much harder and that is the most important skill in being able to speak a language.
  • If speaking is your main goal then I’d suggest picking a Polish course that focuses on speaking such as Pimsleur. I’ve done Pimsleur courses in the past and they get you speaking from day 1 and only teach you useful phrases that you will actually use.

Listening Comprehension

  • The Duolingo Polish course did include lots of listening exercises.
  • This is where they play you an audio clip of a word or phrase and you then have to try and write what was said.
  • There are no prompts other than just the audio clip so it forces you to listen.
  • I found these listening exercises to be really effective as we often rely on the words on the screen when listening.
  • When we read and listen to a sentence at the same time we often think we are good at listening but then when we listen to it on it’s own it can be difficult to understand.
  • This is mainly because we get the understanding from the written words without realizing it.
  • For example, many people find that when watching a video/TV show in their target language with subtitles they can understand what is being said, however when they watch the same video/TV show without subtitles they struggle to understand it at all.
  • For this reason, I think the listening exercises are essential and I found them to be very beneficial to learning.
  • I don’t think you can successfully learn to listen to Polish without this sort of practice.

Reading & Writing

Learning To Read The Script

  • Luckily learning to read the Polish script wasn’t very difficult as it uses mostly the same letters as English with just a few extra letters that have accents on them. 
  • I didn’t really need much guidance on reading as it was very straightforward.
  • The tips section gave some good guidance on pronunciation and I mostly picked up pronunciation just from listening to the words/phrases.

Writing In Polish

  • I found that writing in Polish was actually one of the hardest parts of the Duolingo course.
  • As a native English speaker who hasn’t learnt Polish before (or any similar language), I found that a lot of the words were long and seemed to have extra letters in them that didn’t make much difference to the pronunciation.
  • One word that I struggled with for ages was the word for girl which is ‘dziewczynka’ but is pronounced as ‘jev-chin-ka’.
  • I’d learnt to recognise and pronounce this word fine but trying to recall the spelling was really difficult.
  • Duolingo often gives exercises where they give you an English word/phrase and ask you to type it in Polish.
  • I found these to be the most difficult exercises on the course but I do think they’re really important as you need to be able to recall the words. 
  • One day it took me 5 attempts to get the word cookie (ciasteczka) correct even though I knew how to say it but the spelling was very difficult to remember.
  • This can be quite disheartening but the more I practiced, the more this became easier. Towards the end of the 30 days, I could spell this word with ease.
  • Of course as the Duolingo course is virtual, the writing practice mentioned here is actually typing practice – I still haven’t actually physically written any Polish words with a pen yet. This is something you’d need to do in your own time if you wanted to practice it.
  • One negative point of the Duolingo course is that during these writing exercises, Duolingo accepts words that are written without the correct accents.
  • As an example, ‘thanks’ in Polish is ‘dzięki’ but Duolingo will accept ‘dzieki’ as correct even though the ‘ę’ was not included.
  • Whilst I understand why they have allowed this, I don’t think it actually helps learners because when writing or typing in real life they would need to use the correct accent marks.
  • It leads to learners not learning correct spellings which will hinder them in the future as they learn bad habits. 

Tenses & Cases Covered

  • Tenses are super important when it comes to learning a new language. After completing 30 days of the Duolingo Polish course, I have only used the present tense. 
  • I think it would have been nice to have learnt another tense, especially past tense as I would like to be able to discuss things that happened in the past.
  • Having said this, I can see that topics later in the course do introduce past tense so you’d have to do the course for longer to learn this.
  • Although I would have liked to have learnt some past tense, the course so far did focus a lot on cases. We were taught 3 of Polish’s 7 cases.
  • Cases – Cases are a grammatical concept where the ending of a noun or pronoun changes depending on the context. 
  • I found the cases to be quite hard and confusing (as I’ve heard many Polish learners do), so I think it was a good thing that Duolingo didn’t overload us with different tenses as well because the cases were hard enough.
  • I found that Duolingo did a good job of teaching the cases which have a reputation to be the hardest part of learning Polish.
  • It slowly introduced them, giving lots of examples and building on what we’d learnt so far.

Vocabulary Building And Relevancy

  • Overall I was happy with the vocabulary that Duolingo taught. Most of the vocabulary that was introduced to me was relevant and useful.
  • The first few lessons taught us words like boy, girl, man, woman, bread, milk. After that each topic tended to focus on a particular vocabulary type e.g. there was a food topic that introduced lots of words like food, breakfast, lunch, tea, egg etc.
  • I found that overall the words and phrases taught were relevant for a beginner. 

Memory/SRS

  • Being able to remember and recall words and phrases in Polish is one of the most important things for a language learner.
  • Overall, I found that Duolingo tends to focus on reading more than anything else but they do put in plenty of exercises where you have to recall and type words and phrases from memory.
  • This is usually much harder than reading a phrase in Polish and translating it into English.
  • I’d say I’m much better at reading in Polish than writing/speaking Polish as my recall isn’t as good as my recognition so it would have been good if Duolingo focused on this a bit more. 
  • I also found that you have to have a plan on how you’re going to use Duolingo to ensure you don’t forget words that you’ve already learnt.
  • It’s up to you how long you spend on each topic before moving onto the next and it’s up to you to go back to previous topics and review them.
  • This can be difficult for a new language learner because after a while there’s tons of older topics that need reviewing and I can’t always remember when I last reviewed a particular topic and when’s the best time to review it again.
  • SRS or a spaced repetition system is best for this but Duolingo doesn’t really use SRS.
  • SRS is a method where a learner is asked to remember a certain word/phrase with the time intervals increasing each time the word is presented.
  • I think the Duolingo Polish course could be improved by incorporating a more structured review process to ensure you don’t forget anything you learn in previous lessons.

Was It Fun?

  • One of the main positives of using something like Duolingo to learn a new language is that it is a gamified course.
  • They have lots of incentives that help you to come back everyday and do a few lessons.
  • These include the streak, where you build up a streak everyday that you do Duolingo.
  • They also have leaderboards where you compete against other people to build points and finish top of your league.
  • I found the actual course and content to be quite enjoyable, it’s not boring like reading a textbook.
  • The exercises are varied so you don’t get bored. I definitely think that it would be easy to keep up this routine and complete the entire course.

Overall Progression

  • Overall I am happy with the progress I made doing 30 days of Polish on Duolingo.
  • In terms of the course progress I passed checkpoint 2.
  • As an introduction to the language for a beginner, I think Duolingo does a good job of introducing some basic words, verbs, phrases and concepts.
  • They do introduce new concepts well. There’s tons of practice so you can really become confident using the new words and phrases that you’ve learnt.
  • As I mentioned before, I found that Duolingo wasn’t great for someone looking to speak the language as there’s basically no speaking practice.
  • If your main goal is to be able to speak then you’d be better with an audio course like Pimsleur.
  • Pimsleur gets you speaking from day 1 and has tons of content to build up your confidence and speaking level.

Can You Actually Learn Polish Language With Duolingo?

If you want to become fluent in Polish then you won’t be able to do this with Duolingo alone.

Becoming fully fluent will require lots of different inputs including videos, books, audio lessons and much more.

Duolingo alone won’t get you there but as I said before it is a great introduction to the language.

Is Duolingo Polish Worth It Or Is It A Waste Of Time?

Even though I don’t think you could become fluent in Polish with Duolingo alone,I think it is worth doing especially if you are a beginner and have no prior knowledge of Polish.

It does a good job of teaching you basic concepts, words and phrases and is fantastic in getting you used to the pronunciation and sounds of the language.

If your aim is to become a fluent Polish speaker then it may be still worth doing the course as there’s lots of opportunity to practice and become exposed to the language, however, I’d recommend doing another course such as Pimsleur alongside it as Duolingo has virtually no speaking practice.

Alternatives To Duolingo

There’s plenty of alternatives to Duolingo if you’re wanting to learn Polish fluently. 

My top recommendation is Pimsleur. This audio course will get you speaking from day 1 and has tons of content to build up your confidence and speaking level.

If you’re serious about learning Polish then I’d recommend doing the first Pimsleur lesson for FREE to try it out.

Another fantastic option for learning Polish is Glossika.

They help you to speak a new language quickly with their clever algorithms.

Glossika is also an audio-based course which I think is essential if you want to be a fluent speaker of Polish.

Glossika allows you to acquire grammar and vocabulary through complete sentences (rather than memorizing grammar). 

Finally, PolishPod101 is a great resource for someone looking to learn Polish fluently.

They feature both audio and video lessons recorded by Polish teachers who will explain everything to you in simple terms. They also have word lists and flashcards to help you study.

If you’re on a budget then PolishPod101 has a great YouTube channel that covers lots of content and it’s free.

Check out one of their most popular videos below:

Thanks for reading this Duolingo Polish review. 

I spent 30 days testing out the Duolingo Polish course to find out if it’s worth it. 

If you’re interested in learning more Polish then check our other Polish content here.

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