PolishPal

A free, English-language course that takes complete beginners from their first „Dzień dobry” to A1 Polish, with a recording behind every Polish word.

Type: Language-learning platform
Year: 2026
Live product: polishpal.pl

The idea

Most ways to learn Polish are paid apps or scattered videos. PolishPal is the opposite: an open website that teaches in a fixed order, explains the grammar properly and lets you hear every word, with no account and no paywall.

A course site also has to find its own learners. So the lessons sit next to a large blog that answers what people actually type into Google: how to say thank you, what the cases are, how Poles celebrate Christmas.

lessons, A0 to A1: 16
quizzes with instant feedback: 16
blog articles on the CMS: 100+
Polish audio recordings: 740+

How it works

One clear path
Sixteen short lessons in order, from A0 to A1. Each has vocabulary tables, a dialogue, one grammar point and a quiz. Progress is stored in the browser, so there is nothing to sign up for.
Hear every word
Every Polish line has a speaker button that plays a pre-recorded file. The recordings come from a Polish voice model forced to Polish, so loanwords are not read in English, and were checked by a native speaker. Playback speed goes from 0.6× to 1.25×; if a file were ever missing, the browser's own speech takes over.
A mascot that teaches
Żubek, a bison calf, is an SVG puppet animated with GSAP. He greets you, thinks while you answer, celebrates a passed quiz and moves his mouth in time with the audio.
Video lessons from the same content
YouTube lessons and Shorts are produced from the lesson data itself: scripted scenes rendered to video, voiced, subtitled and scheduled, so the course and the channel never drift apart.

Tools and features

Grammar reference
Tables for genders, cases, conjugations and numbers that every lesson links into.
Quizzes
One per lesson, with instant feedback and a mascot reaction.
Accessibility panel
Text size, spacing and motion settings, remembered on the device.
Share cards
Generated preview images for lessons and pages.

CMS and publishing

The blog runs on Polaris, a custom CMS built into the site. Articles live in a Postgres database (Supabase) and the editor covers SEO fields, a focus keyword, summary, tags and images.

Publishing is scheduled: a daily server job publishes the posts that are due, but only after checking that every image in the article is live and valid, then notifies search engines through IndexNow.

Built to be found

Keyword research with real search volumes before an article is written.
One metadata helper builds the title, description, canonical URL and share image for every page, so nothing is ever missing or inherited by mistake.
Server-rendered, cached pages: fast for people, complete for crawlers.