Teaching My Family
Polish, Three Words
at a Time.

I started building little wordz because I wanted Polish to be part of my daughter's life. My wife, my sister-in-law, and my cousin are all having babies this year. I grew up in a big Polish family, and my brother, my cousins, and I grew up around the language, while our partners married into it.

Speaking Polish was part of our lives, and it's something we want to hand down. I'm not trying to make our children perfectly bilingual or turn the house into a language school. I just want the language to be there.

I want my daughter to know the words my family uses. I want her to understand her grandparents. I want certain Polish phrases to feel normal because she's heard them her entire life: the words used while getting dressed, eating breakfast, going to sleep, being silly, or getting yelled at by her Polish grandmother. The little stuff is what makes a language feel like part of a family.

Three Words Per Day

little wordz is intentionally simple. It generates three Polish words per day, and the experience never asks someone to take on more than those three at once.

I don't want someone opening the app and seeing thirty vocabulary words, five lessons, a progress tree, XP points, and another thing they feel obligated to finish. Three words feels manageable. You can open it, spend a few minutes learning, and move on with your day.

The next day there are another three. Over time, the small sets begin to add up, and the words begin showing up in ordinary life rather than staying inside a lesson.

How Little Wordz Works

Each day starts with three Polish words. Every word has a black-and-white illustration, the Polish spelling, its English meaning, and a simple guide to pronunciation. The learner moves through them like flashcards instead of sitting down for a traditional lesson.

There's no audio pronunciation in the app. We practice saying the words together at home so I can help with the sounds and correct anything that doesn't sound right. Polish is not exactly forgiving when you encounter it for the first time, and practicing together makes pronunciation part of the experience rather than something the learner has to figure out alone.

After the three words, little wordz asks a few short questions. Can you recognize the Polish word? Can you connect it to the English meaning? Can you identify it in context? The questions require a small amount of recall immediately after learning.

Once the set is complete, the words move into the learner's history. Later quizzes can bring them back, so finishing a set doesn't mean the words disappear. The goal isn't to swipe through hundreds of cards. It's to remember enough of them to use them.

The rest of the loop happens outside little wordz. Every few days, I like to quiz my wife and ask her what words she remembers. Sometimes the words come immediately. Sometimes it takes a moment. Sometimes the pronunciation is hilarious. But the words and moments are being remembered.

Learning Alongside Each Other

When I first thought about little wordz, I was thinking mostly about our kids. I liked the idea of building a collection of Polish words and illustrations over time. The artwork is black and white partly because I eventually want to turn the same collection into physical coloring books for them.

Maybe there are flashcards around the house. Maybe one day my daughter colors a picture from the same collection her mom used to learn Polish before she was born.

I'm trying to get my family to learn fifty Polish words before the babies arrive. Those are fifty more words that can naturally exist around them. Then fifty can become a hundred. Eventually, the words stop feeling like vocabulary someone is studying. They're simply words the family knows and uses.

That changes the environment our children grow up in. Polish doesn't have to come from one parent or the grandparents alone. More of the family can participate in it.

I'm Not Trying to Build Duolingo

There's something freeing about building something that doesn't need to work for everyone. I'm not trying to create the best Polish-language product in the world. I'm trying to create the right one for my family.

That means the vocabulary can follow our lives. Right now, babies are coming, so we can learn words about bottles, diapers, strollers, sleeping, eating, baths, and everything else that's about to consume us.

Later, little wordz can change as the kids start walking, going to school, helping cook, celebrating Christmas and Easter, and visiting family. It can grow alongside us.

It can also become increasingly specific to our family. Maybe my dad records pronunciations. Maybe grandparents choose three words for everyone to learn. Maybe we create a Christmas collection each year, let the kids choose words for the adults, or turn a year of words into a physical book.

Building Our Own Little Traditions

This project has made me think differently about family traditions. We usually think about traditions as things that get passed down. Your parents did something, their parents did it, and now you do it.

But somebody had to start each tradition. I doubt most people sat down and announced that they were creating one. They did something, then did it again, and eventually everyone knew it was simply what the family did.

Years from now, maybe nobody remembers that this started with a small website I built before the babies were born. They just know some Polish. They know the phrases their grandparents use. They laugh at the same expressions the rest of us grew up hearing. It's simply part of the family.