Home / Best apps to learn a language / Polish
Prices and language coverage checked in September 2026.
Polish has about 40 million native speakers by Ethnologue’s count, and it is the sixth most spoken language in the European Union and, by speaker counts, its most spoken Slavic one. It is a language of emigration: 611,845 people in England and Wales named it their main language in the 2021 census, the most common after English, and 510,430 people in the United States spoke it at home in 2019. What Polish asks of an app is grammar (seven cases, three genders and verb aspect) and an ear for consonant clusters English never uses.
The big apps stop early for Polish. Duolingo’s course is A1 by an unofficial tracker’s label, Babbel’s runs A1 to A2 by its level sheet, Pimsleur sells one level of 30 lessons, and Busuu is the one big course whose page says B2. The best Polish-only material comes from teachers: Piotr Bechler’s Real Polish, Paulina’s Polski Daily, Easy Polish and the University of Warsaw’s free grammar videos. So the apps below are compared on where they stop, what is free on day 30, whether the cases are explained, and who corrects you.
The US Foreign Service Institute puts Polish in category III (of I to IV), about 1,100 class hours for an English speaker to reach professional working proficiency.
Polish nouns, adjectives and pronouns change their endings across seven cases; there are three genders, and in the plural the masculine personal nouns stand apart from all the rest; every verb is perfective or imperfective; and the number two alone has the forms dwa, dwie, dwaj and dwoje. Babbel says it explains the cases inside its lessons, Polski Daily’s courses and Polski z Anią’s videos explain the grammar in order, and Michel Thomas does it in audio; Duolingo, Pimsleur and Rosetta Stone leave it to patterns. Pick one app that explains, and drill beside it.
Polish spelling runs in one direction: once you know the 32 letters and the seven digraphs (ch, cz, dz, dź, dż, rz, sz), a written word tells you how it sounds, and the stress falls on the second-last syllable in nearly every word. The traps run the other way, from sound to spelling: h or ch, u or ó, ż or rz sound the same. The clusters are the work, as in Brzechwa’s tongue twister “W Szczebrzeszynie chrząszcz brzmi w trzcinie”. Pick apps with native audio beside every text, and say each new word after the recording.
Polish borrows freely from Latin and the West (uniwersytet, informacja, telefon), which gives an English speaker a foothold in a newspaper. The false friends are the price, per Wiktionary: aktualny means current, not actual; ewentualnie means if need be, not eventually; sympatyczny means nice; a magazyn is a warehouse; pensja is a salary, not a pension; a konkurs is a competition. A Ukrainian or Russian speaker gets more for free, the cases, aspect and much of the vocabulary; the new part is the Latin alphabet with sz, cz and rz. Check every lookalike word in a dictionary.
Duolingo’s Polish is A1 by an unofficial tracker’s label of July 2025 and about A2 by a third-party blog, and Polish was not among the 9 courses Duolingo took to B2 in April 2026. Babbel’s Polish runs A1 to A2 by its 2023 level sheet, and Pimsleur has one Polish level of 30 lessons. Busuu’s Polish page says A1 to B2 in 190+ lessons. The Polish-only teachers go further: Polski Daily sells courses to C1 and Real Polish’s programmes run to C1, by their own labels. Past B1, plan on them, a tutor, the radio and books.
The state certificate exam runs five sessions in 2026, at B1, B2, C1 or C2 depending on the session, and not every centre offers every level. It costs 648.96 zł (€150) for B1 or B2 and 778.75 zł (€180) for C1, plus 86.53 zł (€20) for the certificate, per the University of Gdańsk centre. A permanent residence permit needs no Polish; the EU long-term resident permit and citizenship by recognition need a B1 certificate, and since 30 June 2026 school certificates no longer count, per a July 2026 legal summary. Book the level your application names.
Best free daily course
The Polish course is A1 by an unofficial tracker’s label (July 2025) and about A2 by a third-party blog, and Polish was not among the 9 courses Duolingo took to B2 in April 2026. We found no official Stories or Video Call for it. It builds a daily habit for the first months, then you need more.
Good
Where it stops
Best for: A free daily Polish habit from zero to A2; on a laptop, without the Energy cap.
Best course with corrections
Complete Polish is 190+ lessons and 76 hours from A1 to B2 on Busuu’s Polish page, with Polish speakers giving feedback on your written and spoken answers. It is the one big app whose Polish course we could confirm runs to B2, though a short one: the Dutch course has 375+ lessons and 142 hours.
Good
Where it stops
Best for: A1 to B2 learners who want a syllabus and a Polish speaker checking their answers.
Best live tutors
Preply lists 658 Polish tutors, rated 4.97 on average by 9,011 customers, and its Polish page prints averages of US$25 an hour for tutors from Poland and US$21 from Ukraine. Below B1, pick a trained teacher who can explain the cases in your language; from B1 on, a weekly lesson keeps you in Polish with a person who corrects you.
Good
Where it stops
Best for: Anyone from A1 who needs a person to talk to in Polish and to explain the cases.
Best podcast course
Piotr Bechler’s podcast, followed by 22,000+ learners on Spotify by his count, is still running: RP527 came out on 26 September 2026. His VIP Club adds three programmes, 100 Daily Polish Stories, 365 Daily Polish Listening and Polish Language Voyage, 1,500+ lessons from A1 to C1 by his labels. It is the listening we would pair with any course.
Good
Where it stops
Best for: Learners from A1 who want daily Polish in their ears from one teacher, and B1 listeners who want the free podcast.
Best online course to C1
Paulina’s Polish-only site sells courses at every level from A1.1 to C1 by its own labels, with 1,000+ exercises and the transcripts of its 200+ podcast episodes from €4.99 a month, and Zoom clubs on the €21.99 tier. With Real Polish, it is one of two courses here that go past B2, and it prices in euros only.
Good
Where it stops
Best for: A1 to C1 learners who want a Polish teacher’s courses in order, cheaply, and can pay in euros.
Best structured course
Babbel’s Polish page says it explains the noun cases and “how the language works” inside the lessons, without ads. The course runs A1 to A2 by Babbel’s own 2023 level sheet, which we could read only secondhand (its help centre blocked the check). Busuu goes to B2 for a similar price.
Good
Where it stops
Best for: A1 to A2 learners who want the cases explained in writing, no games and no ads, and will pay for it.
Best for reading real books
Lingo7 puts a translation in your own language under every sentence of a Polish book (49 languages), reads it aloud and drills saved words in 12 kinds of exercise. Its 8 Polish books are all C1 by our estimate, mostly poetry: read its Stories, then classics imported free from Wolne Lektury. It is our app, and it has no course.
Good
Where it stops
Best for: A2 and B1 learners reading the Stories, C1 readers who want Pan Tadeusz with their own language under the text, and anyone importing Polish EPUBs, free from Wolne Lektury.
Best for everyday spoken Polish
Polish conversations filmed at home and in everyday life, with Polish and English subtitles, from a Katowice company: “a new one goes up every week”, per easypolish.org, on a channel of 82,700 subscribers by a July 2026 count. It is input, not a course: no order to learn in and no feedback on your own Polish outside the membership.
Good
Where it stops
Best for: A2 learners and up who want to hear how Poles talk, with subtitles in both languages.
Best for speaking from lesson one
Pimsleur’s Polish is one level of 30 audio lessons, about 16 hours by a retailer’s listing, in which you answer out loud and words come back at spaced intervals, in “Standard Polish, as spoken or understood throughout Poland”. Pimsleur publishes no CEFR level and sells no Polish Level 2. A month of Polish Premium covers the 30 lessons.
Good
Where it stops
Best for: A trip in a month, a commute, or anyone who wants to say their first Polish sentences out loud before they read.
Best sentence drill
Fill the blank in real Polish sentences, in collections from the 100 most common words to more than 50,000, and the case endings come up in nearly every sentence. Clozemaster prints no Polish sentence count; Tatoeba’s open corpus holds 137,215 Polish sentences. The free 30 sentences a day are enough beside a course.
Good
Where it stops
Best for: Ten minutes a day on the case endings from A2 upward, beside a course or a book.
Best for video input
Polish subtitles and a translation into your language side by side on YouTube, with a dictionary on click; the subtitles and lookups cost nothing. The Netflix side broke around 30 June 2026, per a July 2026 third-party report, and we could not confirm a fix by 29 September 2026.
Good
Where it stops
Best for: B1 and up with a laptop, turning Polish YouTube into listening practice.
Best for phrases with native video
Memrise has an official Polish course of 200+ lessons and 3,000+ words, with 75+ video clips of native speakers saying the phrases and 75+ AI conversations for trying them out, per its Polish page. It gives no CEFR level and teaches no grammar, so it sits beside a course, not in place of one.
Good
Where it stops
Best for: The first few hundred Polish phrases with real voices, at the yearly price.
Pick one course and do it every day: Busuu if you want a syllabus and Polish speakers correcting you, Duolingo if the game keeps you going. Watch Polski z Anią, the University of Warsaw’s free grammar videos, for the cases as they come up. Pimsleur is the paid choice if you want to speak before you read, and Michel Thomas’s Foundation Polish, 8 hours of audio for US$100 once, is the audio course that explains the cases; with a US library card, Mango is a second free start.
Polski Daily + Easy Polish + Preply
Keep your course going to B1: Busuu’s runs to B2, while Babbel stops at A2 by its level sheet and Duolingo at A1 by the tracker’s label. Add Polski Daily’s courses for the grammar in order, watch Easy Polish every week, drill the case endings in Clozemaster, and book a Preply tutor once a week who keeps the lesson in Polish. Start reading with Lingo7’s Stories at A2, then graded readers you import; its 8 shelf books are all C1 by our estimate.
Lingo7 + Language Reactor + Preply
Courses thin out here. Read Prus, Żeromski or Sienkiewicz in Lingo7 from free Wolne Lektury EPUBs, or Pan Tadeusz on its shelf, watch Polish YouTube with Language Reactor, move from Easy Polish to the Real Polish podcast and Polskie Radio, and talk about all of it with your tutor. With a certificate exam date, book a tutor who has taught it.
| App | Role | Levels | Coverage for Polish | Free | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Duolingo | Best free daily course | A0 to A2 | Standard Polish; A1 by an unofficial tracker’s label (July 2025), about A2 by a third-party blog; 49 units by a September 2026 count, no official Stories found | Every lesson; Energy cap on a phone | US$13 to 17 a month, US$7 to 10 a month yearly |
| Busuu | Best course with corrections | A1 to B2 | Standard Polish; A1 to B2 on the Polish page; 190+ lessons and 76 hours; AI review tools, no live lessons named | Lessons and corrections | US$10 to 15 a month, US$6 to 12 a month yearly |
| Preply | Best live tutors | A1 to C2 | 658 Polish tutors; averages of US$25 an hour from Poland, US$21 from Ukraine and US$29 from Belarus, per the Polish page | None | Average US$25 an hour, subscription only |
| Real Polish | Best podcast course | A1 to C1 | Standard Polish; podcast B1 and up, three member programmes A1 to C1, by the host’s labels; 1,500+ lessons; episode 527 on 26 September 2026 | The podcast audio | Free podcast; about US$22 a month (87 PLN) |
| Polski Daily | Best online course to C1 | A1 to C1 | Standard Polish; courses A1.1, A1.2, A2, B1, B2 and C1 by its labels; 200+ podcast episodes; Zoom clubs on the top tier | 3 day trial | From €4.99 a month; €169 a year with clubs |
| Babbel | Best structured course | A1 to A2 | Standard Polish; A1 to A2 by Babbel’s 2023 level sheet; cases explained in the lessons | First lesson per course | About US$9 a month yearly on the web |
| Lingo7 | Best for reading real books | A2 to C1 | 8 public domain books, all C1 by our estimate, mostly poetry; Stories in two versions, adapted for A1 to A2 and original for B1 to B2; your own books in 7 formats (EPUB, PDF, FB2, DOCX, TXT, Markdown, HTML); native audio in a Poland accent; translation into 49 languages | First page of each book | US$5 a month, US$2.50 a month yearly |
| Easy Polish | Best for everyday spoken Polish | A2 to B1 | Street interviews with Polish and English subtitles; 82,700 YouTube subscribers by a July 2026 count; a new video every week, per the site; membership courses A1 to B1 | Videos and podcast audio | Free videos; membership prices on its site |
| Pimsleur | Best for speaking from lesson one | A0 to A1 | Level 1 only: 30 lessons, about 16 hours; “Standard Polish, as spoken or understood throughout Poland”; no vendor CEFR claim | 7 day trial | About US$20 a month, US$150 a year |
| Clozemaster | Best sentence drill | A2 to C1 | Polish from English; collections from the 100 most common words to more than 50,000; no Polish sentence count published | 30 sentences a day | US$13 a month, US$7 a month yearly |
| Language Reactor | Best for video input | B1 to C2 | Any Polish YouTube video with subtitles; Netflix broken around 30 June 2026, fix unconfirmed by 29 September 2026 | Most of it | US$6 a month, US$3.33 a month yearly |
| Memrise | Best for phrases with native video | A0 to A2 | Standard Polish; 200+ lessons, 3,000+ words, 75+ native speaker videos; no CEFR mapping | Limited, with ads | US$25 a month, US$5 a month yearly |
Prices are US store or vendor prices as of September 2026, yearly plans shown as the monthly equivalent. The same app often costs less on its own site than in the App Store, and more in Europe than in the US.
Free on this site: public domain Polish books you can open in the app, and short Polish texts at A1, A2 and B1 with a translation.
We have no affiliate deals with any app named here, and none of the links pay us. Prices and coverage come from the vendor’s own help or pricing pages or its US store listing, checked in September 2026, and every other figure names its source in the text; the judgement calls lean on independent reviews, and on the one star reviews for the parts a landing page never shows, like what happens on renewal. Where a vendor’s pages contradict each other, the card says so.
Refund rules, the traps to avoid and the same apps compared by level for every language are on the best apps to learn a language page.
For a start, yes, and it is free: the Polish course has 49 units by a September 2026 count. On its own it is not enough: an unofficial tracker labels the course A1 (July 2025), Polish was not among the 9 courses Duolingo took to B2 in April 2026, we found no official Stories for it, the cases are taught by pattern, and on a phone Energy runs out after about 2 to 3 lessons a day, by a third-party count (the web version runs on hearts). Add Busuu’s A1 to B2 course or Polski Daily for the grammar, Real Polish or Easy Polish for listening, and a person to talk to once you can put a few sentences together.
The ones that explain in writing: Babbel says its Polish lessons explain the noun cases, to A2 by its level sheet; Polski Daily’s courses go from A1.1 to C1 by its labels, the A1 to A2 ones in its €4.99 a month plan. Polski z Anią, 29 free grammar videos by Dr Anna Rabczuk of the University of Warsaw, covers the cases, tenses, participles and the passive. Michel Thomas’s Foundation Polish explains them in 8 hours of audio for US$100. Busuu’s course runs to B2 with Polish speakers correcting your endings; Duolingo, Pimsleur and Rosetta Stone leave them to patterns; Clozemaster drills them, 30 a day free. A tutor who explains the cases in your language saves the most time.
No app here is built around the exam, though Easy Polish’s membership has a B1 exam preparation course and Real Polish says its Voyage programme prepares for the state exams; book a tutor who has taught it. The exam runs five sessions in 2026, in February, April, June, October and December, at B1, B2, C1 or C2; a US centre, the Polish Supplementary Schools Council, ran the February one. It costs 648.96 zł (€150) for B1 or B2 and 778.75 zł (€180) for C1, plus 86.53 zł (€20) for the certificate. A permanent residence permit needs no Polish; the EU long-term resident permit and citizenship by recognition need a B1 certificate, and school certificates stopped counting on 30 June 2026.
Reading grows your vocabulary, and Polish spelling tells you how a word sounds, but the page does not train your ear for the clusters. Read with audio. Lingo7, our app, puts a translation under each sentence of a Polish book, reads it aloud in a Poland accent and drills the words you save in 12 kinds of exercise, for US$5 a month or US$30 a year. Its Polish shelf is 8 books, all C1 by our estimate and mostly poetry (Pan Tadeusz, Balady i romanse, Anhelli, Łąka), so begin with its Stories, then import EPUBs from Wolne Lektury, 7,329 works with over 1,000 audiobooks: Korczak’s Król Maciuś Pierwszy, Sienkiewicz’s W pustyni i w puszczy, Prus’s Lalka.
For a course, Duolingo (every lesson free, A1 by an unofficial tracker’s label, with Energy capping study on a phone) or Busuu, whose 190+ lesson course runs from A1 to B2 and whose Polish speakers correct your answers on the free plan. For the grammar, Polski z Anią’s 29 videos from the University of Warsaw and Mówić po polsku; with a US library card, Mango. For listening, Real Polish’s podcast and Easy Polish. For drills, Clozemaster’s 30 free sentences a day; for books, Wolne Lektury’s 7,329 works as free EPUB. For a tutor you pay: Preply at about US$25 an hour from Poland, on a subscription, or italki with none.
Yes: the cases, verb aspect and much of the vocabulary are shared, and Wikipedia’s list of mutually intelligible languages says a Ukrainian speaker can hold a conversation with a Polish speaker. Nobody has published a percentage we could check. The new parts are the Latin alphabet with its digraphs (sz, cz, rz, dź), the fixed stress on the second-last syllable and the false friends. Since 2022 more than a million Ukrainians have settled in Poland (1.75 million Ukrainians lived there in February 2025, per the Office for Foreigners), and for them the state B1 certificate is the route to long-term residence and citizenship, since school certificates stopped counting on 30 June 2026.
Read your first page free, in Polish.