🇵🇱 → 🇷🇺

How easy is Russian for Polish speakers?

Going from Polish to Russian (Русский) has a composite linguistic distance of 48% (curated lexical data). Below is the dimension-by-dimension breakdown.

48% distance FSI Cat III — ~1,100 hours

Lexical similarity

38%

Shared vocabulary, cognates, and loanwords.

Grammatical distance

87%

Morphology, syntax, word order, cases.

Phonological similarity

33%

Shared sounds and phoneme inventory.

Writing-system match

Latin → Cyrillic

Genealogical kinship

70%

Indo-European ↔ Indo-European

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Sample sentences side-by-side

How everyday sentences look in both languages:

🇵🇱 Polish

Зима холодная и длинная, но весна приносит тепло и свет.

🇷🇺 Russian

Zima jest zimna i długa, ale wiosna przynosi ciepło i światło.

🇵🇱 Polish

Студент читает книги в библиотеке каждый день.

🇷🇺 Russian

Student czyta książki w bibliotece każdego dnia.

Curated cognates between Polish and Russian

Word pairs that share a common etymological root — instantly recognisable across both languages:

water

woda ↔ вода (voda)
house

dom ↔ дом (dom)
milk

mleko ↔ молоко (moloko)
brother

brat ↔ брат (brat)

Other easy languages for Polish speakers

The 5 languages with the lowest linguistic distance from Polish:

Think you can tell them apart?

A quick 3-question check between Polish and Russian. No signup.