Learn Polish with short stories

Stories to read in Polish, with the English beside each paragraph. They open in the browser, with no account needed, and each free one is also a free Polish–English ebook for Kindle, Kobo or any e-reader: downloading needs a free account, no payment (which file to pick).

Open the Polish–English library, where you can search the stories and filter them by level.

Want to hear it too? Polish stories with audio are narrated, free, with a speed control.

By level:

• Beginner (A1–A2): Easy Polish short stories for beginners, with English translation · 162 stories
• Intermediate (B1–B2): Intermediate Polish short stories, side by side with English · 189 stories
• Advanced (C1–C2): Advanced Polish stories, with the English alongside · 31 stories

Every story here carries its level on the Common European Framework, from A1 for beginners to C1 and beyond, so the library works as a set of Polish graded readers, most of them free: start at the level where you understand most of a page, and move up when the English beside it is something you check only now and then.

Polish looks harder on the page than it is to read: once you know that sz, cz, rz and the letters ą, ę, ł, ś, ź, ż each stand for one sound, the spelling is regular and every word can be read aloud.

The real work is the grammar: seven cases change the end of nouns and adjectives, and verbs come in pairs (robić and zrobić, to be doing and to get done). With the English beside each paragraph, you can follow a story long before the endings are second nature.

For Polish speakers, a parallel text makes English books quicker going: read the English and look across to the Polish when an idiom, a phrasal verb or an English tense doesn’t land.

It works for families abroad too: one book, two languages on the same page, so children growing up with English can keep reading Polish with their parents and grandparents.

382 English stories in the library have Polish alongside: Nauka angielskiego z krótkich opowiadań.

Long out of copyright and easy to find as EPUBs. Any of them makes a good first Polish–English parallel text:

• Lalka, Bolesław Prus
• Quo vadis, Henryk Sienkiewicz
• Pan Tadeusz, Adam Mickiewicz
• Chłopi, Władysław Reymont

Or use a book you already own: the method works best with something you actually want to read. See how to read a parallel text to get the most from it.