paseoDifficulty, honestly
Is Polish hard to learn?
For English speakers, Polish is a real step up from Spanish or French. Seven cases and consonant clusters are the usual reasons. A greeting is not as far away as the tables suggest.
Less familiar than it might seem
Polish is a Slavic language. If you already speak one, a lot of the structure will feel related. If you speak English and nothing else, little of the vocabulary will look familiar, and the spelling is more regular than it first appears.
Is Polish easy to learn? A memorized phrase can be. Building a new sentence with the right ending, while someone waits, is the harder part. How hard is Polish to learn depends on which of those you practice.
How long it takes
The U.S. Foreign Service Institute groups Polish with the languages that take English speakers about 1100 classroom hours to reach a professional working level, in a full-time course. That is more than German, and less than Arabic or Japanese. The figure is for a high professional standard. It is not a promise about fluency, and it is not how long a simple conversation takes.
A greeting can happen this week. Ordering coffee can happen this month. Comfort in a wandering chat takes longer, and it arrives sooner if you talk a little every day.
Cześć, jak się masz?
Hi, how are you?
Poproszę kawę.
Coffee, please.
What actually feels hard
Case endings that change the word. Aspect, later, when a verb cares whether the action is finished. Consonant clusters your mouth has not practiced. Understanding someone who is not slowing down.
How hard is it to learn Polish is partly a choice of method. A case chart makes it feel academic. A daily conversation makes the endings show up inside a sentence you needed anyway. Repeat phrases you will say again, and ask for a slower turn when you need it.
Może pani powtórzyć?
Can you repeat that?