Why is it so ‘difficult’? Let’s start with the grammar. There are three genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter) and no fewer than seven cases – meaning that every noun can appear in seven different forms, depending on its grammatical function in the sentence. To us, for example, beer is always beer, except when there are several beers on the table. But its Polish equivalent piwo changes (or declines) slyly according to its grammatical context. To take just some of these cases, the straightforward ‘Lubię piwo’ (‘I like beer’) becomes ‘Nie lubię piwa’ (‘I don’t like beer’), which is different to ‘Przygladam się piwu’ (‘I’m looking [carefully] at beer’), which is also different to ‘Rozmawiam o piwie’ (‘I’m talking about beer’), which is yet again not the same as ‘Rozmawiam z piwem’ (‘I’m talking with beer’), a sentence that is probably never uttered except by an English speaker attempting to drown their sorrows at having to learn seven times the number of words they were expecting.
You can’t have your cake and eat it
Then there’s verb aspect which, in a nutshell, uses completely separate verbs to convey whether an action has been completed or is ongoing, something we use certain tenses for in English. ‘Jem ciastko’ (‘I’m eating a cake’) uses the present tense of the imperfective verb jeść (to eat), but to translate ‘I ate a cake’ you need the past tense of its perfective twin, zjeść, so ‘Zjadłem ciastko’. Unfortunately this point is notoriously difficult to master, but it’s a key feature of Slavic languages, and kiedy wejdziesz między wrony musisz krakać jak one (when you’re among crows, you must caw), so it can’t be avoided. And I won’t even start on numbers – there are twenty-two different forms of dwie (two), depending on whether you’re talking about dwie kobiety (two women), dwa koty frogv (two cats), dwaj mężczyźni (two men)… and the list goes on.
Pronunciation
Then there are the subtleties of the famously sibilant pronunciation. Polish distinguishes between three forms of ‘ch’ (cz, ć, and ź), two forms of ‘sh’ (sz and ś), and two forms of ‘j’ (dż and dź), along with ‘ds’ (dz), ‘ts’ (c), and plain old ‘s’ (just s). These are all distinctive sounds in their own right, with two ways to spell what we’d describe as a French ‘j’ (as in bonjour) (ż and rz) thrown in for good measure. This leaves English speakers in a tailspin as we shush and hush our way through phrases, grasping for familiar vowels. Beware falling into the trap of pronouncing ch incorrectly (it’s something like the ch in loch). A simple-looking word like chłopiec (boy) is pronounced ‘hwop-ee-ets’, the very useful chcesz (Would you like…) is something like ‘hwuht-sesh’, and chodźmy (Let’s go…) is ‘hwoj-meh’.