Read books in Polish.
Open Schulz, Lem, Tokarczuk, Mickiewicz. Some of the most original prose in Europe, in a language with a difficult reputation and a lot to give back.
Why read Polish books in the original
Polish has seven cases, three genders, and clusters of consonants that look impossible on the page. The language has a reputation for being hard. It mostly is. It's also worth it.
Bruno Schulz writes prose unlike anyone else. Stanisław Lem invented half of modern science fiction. Olga Tokarczuk won the Nobel for novels that could only have been written in Polish. The Polish 20th century is one of the great literary centuries.
For Slavic-language speakers, Polish is recognisable; for Romance and Germanic speakers, it's a longer climb. Either way, the alphabet is Latin and the spelling is regular - if you know the rules, you know how to pronounce it.
What it looks like
W owe długie, jesienne wieczory zatapialiśmy się w lekturze starych książek.
ZATAPIALIŚMY → (WE) WERE IMMERSINGFirst-person plural, imperfective past of zatapiać się (“to immerse oneself”). Polish verbs come in pairs - perfective and imperfective - that mean different things. Reading is how you start to feel the difference.
Six Polish books worth your time
Sklepy cynamonowe
Prose like nobody else's. Schulz's Polish is dense, baroque, full of metaphors. Hard, but unforgettable.
Solaris
Lem's most famous novel. The Polish is more accessible than Schulz, the ideas are some of the strangest in 20th century science fiction.
Bieguni
A novel made of fragments about travel and the body. Won the International Booker. Tokarczuk's Polish is contemporary and inviting.
Pan Tadeusz
The Polish national epic, in verse. Long, beloved, and much closer to modern Polish than people expect.
Quo vadis
Historical novel set in Nero's Rome. Won Sienkiewicz the Nobel. The Polish is 19th century but readable.
Prowadź swój pług przez kości umarłych
Murder mystery told by a William Blake fan in a remote Polish village. Modern, funny, dark.
How LinguaRead works with Polish
Drop in any Polish EPUB. Tap a word for the meaning, the case, the aspect, the gender. Tap again to see what's happening grammatically in this exact sentence.
Polish nouns change form depending on case (seven of them) and the case depends on what role the word plays. None of that maps neatly to English. Reading shows you how it works in practice, which is how you start to internalise it.
Pick a Polish book. Start reading.
Free to try on iPhone & iPad. Plus from $5.99/month, cancel anytime.
Download on App Store