Pronouncing your first Polish words

Polish king Kazimierz was desonorized.
To find out why, keep reading!

During this lesson you will learn how to pronounce Polish words. You will learn why you sometimes need to pronounce Polish voiced letters as voiceless sounds and what desonorization process is.

If you want to learn Polish it is very important that you distinguish between voiced and voiceless consonants. The simple difference between voiced and voiceless consonants is the use of vocal cords. If you use them, the consonant is voiced and if you do not, it is voiceless. Compare English words tea and dad (what I mean by compare is - say them out loud!). The only difference between t and d is that when you pronounce t in tea you do not use your vocal cords and when you say d in dad you use your vocal cords. If you still do not hear the difference, you can try to feel it - pronounce t and d while touching your neck near the throat. When you pronounce d it vibrates, when you pronounce t it does not.

Polish ą and ę - nasal vowels

During this lesson you will learn how to pronounce the two most difficult vowels in Polish - ą and ę. You will understand that sometimes ą and ę may represent more than one sound.

Although ą looks like an a with a tail it has nothing to do with an a sound - it is actually a nasal o. Polish is the only Slavic language which still has nasal vowels (apart from Kashubian which is often considered as a dialect only). The tricky thing about ą and ę (nasal e) is that most of the time they represent two sounds - the exact pronunciation depends on the letter which follows it. Here are the rules:

Polish alphabet and digraphs

Gorals still distinguish between ó and u

During this lesson you will learn the Polish alphabet and digraphs.

Most language courses begin with introducing simple phrases and common words. I believe that a much better approach is to first learn how to speak and read and then to expand vocabulary.

Polish alphabet (polskie abecadło) contains 32 letters:

A Ą B C Ć D E Ę F G H I J K L Ł M N Ń O Ó P R S Ś T U W Y Z Ź Ż

To hear the alphabet please play the following video: