Polish language belongs to the West Slavonic group of Indo-European languages. It took shape in the tenth century. Initially, languages such as German, Czech and Latin influenced the language. Then, it was influenced by French and English language.
Polish language is used by 45 million people, of which more than 38 million people live in Poland.
More and more people around the world learn Polish as a secondary language. It is estimated that there are over 10 000 people, of which 1/3 is studying Polish universities and language schools.
Consonants sound pretty much like they do in English, there are only 3 tenses: present, future and past and the stress of a word is always on the penultimate syllable. In Polish there are no articles. The Polish alphabet is very similar to most of the European alphabets with the exception of some of the Polish letters like ó, ż, ź, ą and ę. The alphabet is phonetic.
Learning of Polish will allow you to understand some West Slavonic languages – Czech, Slovak, Serbian. It will be easier to learn the Belarusian, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Russian, Slovenian, and Ukrainian.