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Weather in Polish

The words and phrases to talk about the weather, with audio. Tap a row to hear it.

Talking about the weather is one of the first genuinely useful things you can do in Polish. It is the small talk that fills a lift ride, a shop queue, or the start of every phone call, and Poland gives you plenty to talk about: hot, thundery summers, long grey autumns, and winters that can drop well below freezing. The word for weather itself is pogoda, and the everyday question is Jaka jest pogoda? — literally “What is the weather like?”

The single most important thing to learn here is the verb pada. It means, roughly, “it is falling,” and Polish uses it for anything coming out of the sky. You do not need two different verbs the way English separates “to rain” and “to snow” — instead you say pada deszcz (rain is falling) and pada śnieg (snow is falling), reusing the same handy verb. In casual speech people often drop the noun entirely and just say pada, and everyone understands it means “it's raining.”

Temperature works differently again. To say it is hot, cold, or warm, Polish uses jest plus an adverb, not an adjective: jest zimno (it's cold), jest ciepło (it's warm), jest gorąco (it's hot). Notice there is no word for “it” — the jest carries the whole idea on its own. This impersonal pattern shows up all over Polish, so getting comfortable with it here pays off later.

Below you'll find the core weather vocabulary and then the phrases that put it to work. Tap any row to hear the pronunciation, repeat it out loud, and try to picture the scene as you say it — a habit that makes the words stick far better than silent reading. Once these feel natural, you'll be able to open almost any conversation in Polish with a comment about the sky.

Weather words — pogoda

Useful phrases — przydatne zwroty

Keep going

Practise in the word games (the Weather topic) or My Vocabulary. Related guides: animals, colours, numbers.