Polish: An Essential Grammar review — Routledge grammar reference in English
Grammar reference in English
Best for: Learners who read English and want one place to look up cases, verb forms, aspect and numerals while using a coursebook.
- Authors
- Dana Bielec
- Publisher
- Routledge
- Edition
- 2012
- Level
- A1–B2
- ISBN
- 978-0-415-59559-9
What this book is
Polish: An Essential Grammar is a reference grammar in English by Dana Bielec, published by Routledge (second edition 2012, 448 pages). It is not a course and has no exercises: you use it to look things up — case endings, conjugations, aspect pairs, numerals — while you learn from another book.
Who it suits best
- Learners who read English and want clear tables and examples for the whole of Polish grammar in one volume.
- People preparing for the B1 exam who keep getting the same forms wrong and need to check the rule quickly.
- Teachers who want a reliable reference in English.
Who should pick something else
- Anyone looking for practice: there are no exercises, no answers and no audio. Routledge sells separate workbooks for that.
- Learners who do not read English well.
What's inside
- The Polish language — alphabet, pronunciation and stress, sound changes, and a chapter on how to study an inflected language, with an analysed sample text.
- Parts of speech — verbs, nouns, pronouns, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, numerals, particles, plus greetings and idioms.
- Sentence structure, followed by nine appendices and an index.
What learners and teachers say
On Amazon the second edition has 4.2 out of 5 from about 20 ratings, and on Goodreads the first edition averages 4.58 from 19 ratings — the highest average of the English-language books on our list (checked October 2026).
- Praised: clear, jargon-free and logically structured — one reader says it "presents its grammar clearly without confusing jargon, often in easy-to-use tables, with loads of examples of everyday Polish"; it is easy to look things up; and it works well next to a course or the author's own workbooks Basic Polish and Intermediate Polish.
- Criticised: it is "definitely not written for the layperson" and is not a beginners' course; one reader wanted more examples of when to use each case, and another preferred Routledge's larger Polish: A Comprehensive Grammar. Both one-star reviews concern the Kindle edition, which displays Polish letters wrongly (ł as l) — so buy the printed book.
- Price: imported copies cost roughly 330–345 zł on Polish price-comparison sites (October 2026).
Our verdict
Worth owning as a reference if you read English. Keep it next to your coursebook, and put the rules into practice with an exercise book or our B1 practice tests, whose grammar module shows which forms still need work.
These reviews are independent. We are not paid by any publisher or bookshop, and we do not sell these books. Descriptions are based on the publishers' information, the books' contents and publicly available reviews by learners and teachers.