Evidence-based learning technique
Improve your Polish while enjoying world's best books
Lingo7 is a mobile app for learning Polish by reading real books. Every sentence appears as parallel text, so you tap any word for an instant translation, hear native narration, and save new words to review later. It works on iOS and Android, and you can import your own books in Polish.
Every Polish sentence is shown side by side with its English translation. You read naturally, absorbing Polish vocabulary and grammar in context, no stopping to look up words.
Turn on the audio and follow along with your eyes, a great way to level up your Polish listening and pronunciation.
Spaced repetition is one of the most rigorously studied learning techniques of the last century, repeatedly shown to outperform cramming and re-reading by a wide margin. Lingo7 tracks every word you tap while reading and brings it back for review right before you'd forget it. 14 different exercises, from quick recognition to active recall, typing and pronunciation, strengthen memory from every angle.
See a word and pick the correct translation from four options
Listen to a word and choose the correct translation, trains your ear
Build the word letter by letter from scrambled characters
See a word and a translation, quickly decide if it's correct
Pronounce the word and get instant accuracy feedback
Try to recall the translation from memory before revealing it
Your favorite novel, your work textbook, your kid's bedtime story, drop any EPUB, PDF or DOCX into Lingo7 and it becomes a parallel-reading experience in Polish. No book is off limits.
Drop in an EPUB, PDF or DOCX and Lingo7 instantly turns every page into parallel reading, original on one side, Polish translation on the other. Audio, word saving and spaced-repetition work out of the box.
Want to read a real book in Polish, but the words and grammar are still too hard? Lingo7 rewrites the whole book in easier Polish, same story, same characters, same ending. Just simpler words and easier grammar, so you can actually read it through.
What this means for you:
Nie ma nic prawdziwszego od fizjonomii, w połączeniu ze sposobem bycia. Sztuka czytania tej księgi, którą Wieczna Mądrość zobowiązuje każdą istotę ludzką do przedstawienia swojej własnej strony z wypisanym na niej indywidualnym charakterem, jest trudna, być może, i mało studiowana.
Fizjognomia jest prawdziwa, gdy patrzysz na sposób bycia. Sztuka czytania twarzy i ich charakteru jest trudna. Może wymaga to naturalnej umiejętności.
Hand-picked stories, summaries and articles, already prepared for Polish with audio and parallel translation.
Real stories from language learners around the world
The 5 principles every polyglot uses, built into Lingo7.
Principle: Extensive reading, consuming large volumes of text you can mostly understand, is one of the most research-backed paths to fluency (Krashen's input hypothesis). The trick is removing friction so you can read a lot without stopping.
How Lingo7 helps: Parallel translation sits right next to the original, no dictionary lookups, no breaking flow. Turbo mode highlights words in rhythm if you lose your place, so you can devour pages instead of decoding them.
Principle: Spaced repetition is one of the most rigorously studied learning techniques of the last century. The idea: review each word just before you would have forgotten it, that's when a single repetition strengthens memory the most.
How Lingo7 helps: Lingo7's spaced repetition system tracks every word you save and brings it back at the optimal interval. You don't schedule anything, the algorithm handles timing, and 14 different exercises keep memory sharp from every angle.
Principle: Polyglots don't memorize every word in order, they focus on the ones that pay off. High-frequency words dominate everyday language: a few hundred of the most common words are enough to start understanding real books, conversations, and articles.
How Lingo7 helps: Two frequency-ranked starter collections built from corpus data, the 100 most popular words to get off the ground, then 250 more for real traction. Available in 49 languages. Learn the minimum that gives you the maximum, instead of chasing a dictionary you'll never finish.
Principle: Boring textbooks kill motivation. Polyglots choose texts they actually enjoy, favorite books, articles, scripts, because interest is what sustains daily practice for months and years, not willpower.
How Lingo7 helps: A large, growing library across genres, classic novels, contemporary articles, topic summaries. You pick what you actually care about, not what a textbook assigns. Interest does the hard work of keeping you consistent.
Principle: Real progress happens when reading, listening, vocabulary, and pronunciation reinforce each other. A word you've read, heard, and pronounced is remembered in a way that isolated drilling can't match, overall results grow stronger than the sum of individual exercises.
How Lingo7 helps: One session covers all four: you read a page with parallel translation, listen to the narration with word-by-word highlighting, tap new words to save them, and practice pronunciation on the ones you learn. Four skills trained in parallel, in 7-15 minutes a day.
Polish is FSI Category III (1100 hours) and is considered challenging due to its seven cases, complex consonant clusters, and irregular grammar. However, it uses the Latin alphabet and has relatively regular spelling rules. Extensive reading helps learners internalize the case system through pattern exposure.
Polish features consonant clusters like "szcz" and nasal vowels that are unfamiliar to English speakers. However, stress is regular (almost always on the penultimate syllable) and spelling is consistent once you learn the letter combinations. Reading aloud is an effective pronunciation practice method.
Polish provides strong foundations for Czech, Slovak, and Ukrainian due to shared Slavic vocabulary and grammar. Polish and Czech share about 76% lexical similarity. Learning Polish through reading also builds skills transferable to other case-based languages like German or Russian.
Poland has the EU's fifth-largest economy and a growing tech sector. Polish communities exist throughout the UK, Germany, and the US. Knowledge of Polish is valuable in manufacturing, IT outsourcing, and EU institutions where Polish representation is significant.
Expert guides and practical advice to help you read books in Polish.
An honest, curated guide to the best Polish books for learners at every level, graded readers, children's classics, and real literature, plus how to learn Polish by reading well.
Read more →MethodologyWhat CEFR level can read books? A reader's guide to A1, A2, B1, B2, C1, C2: the can-do descriptors, rough vocabulary size, and what to read at each level.
Read more →MethodologyWhat comprehensible input is, Krashen's input hypothesis and the i+1 idea, why it matters, its honest limits, and how to find your level by CEFR with reading.
Read more →Polish connects you with 45 million speakers and a Nobel Prize-winning literary tradition including Szymborska, Milosz, and Tokarczuk, plus a major European economy and the largest Slavic language using Latin script.
Polish has seven grammatical cases, complex consonant clusters that challenge learners (like szcz), a rich system of word derivation through prefixes and suffixes, and grammatical gender that extends to past-tense verbs.
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