⁨Pisz po polsku!⁩ review — writing practice for the B1 Polish exam

What this book is

Pisz po polsku! ("Write in Polish!") is a guide and workbook devoted to one part of the B1 exam: writing. Its author, Małgorzata Januszewicz, is a linguist and Polish teacher who also publishes lessons on YouTube. The book has 160 pages and an answer key for its exercises.

It covers 17 written genres — greetings, invitations, apologies, thanks, announcements, e-mails and text messages, descriptions of people, stories, reports, reviews and short essays — and offers about 51 topics of the kind set in the exam.

Who it suits best

• B1 candidates who are fine with reading and listening but lose points in writing.
• Learners who want model texts and ready phrase lists for each genre: how to open and close a formal letter, how to apologise, how to invite, how to complain.
• People studying on their own who have someone to read their texts — a teacher, a tutor or an AI checker.

Who should pick something else

• Anyone looking for a full course: the book does not cover listening, reading, grammar or speaking.
• Candidates who want complete mock exam papers: there are no full writing sections in exam format.
• Learners below A2: some exercises are above B1, and all instructions are in Polish.

What's inside

The book is organised in three blocks:

1. General advice on writing — starting from the rule the author puts up front: on the exam you have to follow the rules of each genre, because every genre has them.
2. Model texts for each genre, with hints on structure, register and useful phrases.
3. Exercises — mostly controlled: putting fragments of a text in order, separating two mixed texts, answering guiding questions before writing a report ("What was it? Who was there?").

Its strongest side is pragmatics — who is writing to whom, and how formal it must be. Free-writing tasks cannot be marked with the key, so plan for someone to check them.

What learners and teachers say

On the Poltax bookshop the book has six reviews, all 5 out of 5, written mostly around its launch in 2021. Readers call it "a wonderful publication the market was missing", praise the clear exercises and the many examples of each text type, and one recommends it "wholeheartedly to anyone taking the B1 exam or preparing students for it". It was also picked among the best B1 preparation books in a 2026 learner video on YouTube.

Two academic reviews of B1 preparation materials (Banach, Języki Obce w Szkole, 2022; Grochala, University of Łódź, 2022) are more balanced. Both praise its clear structure and accessible explanations. Their criticisms: the exercises are mostly controlled and not very varied, some tasks are above B1, formal examples are missing for a few genres, and there are no complete exam-format writing sets. Grochala adds that the book is weaker on building longer texts such as descriptions and essays, and — as with any writing book — your free texts still need someone to correct them.

Our verdict

The best writing-only supplement for the B1 exam. Buy it if writing is your weakest part, learn the model of each genre, and have your own texts checked. Combine it with a full course or with our writing practice with AI feedback, which marks your text against the exam criteria.