Germans look at Polish and see incomprehensible series of consonants. While to the east, Polish sounds so strange to Russians that they even have a verb for Poles speaking their language: pshekat. To top it off, Czechs think Poles sound like Czech children with a speech disorder.
What makes Polish sound so uniquely challenging? While most individual sounds are known to English-speakers ‒ read our listen-along Foreigner’s Guide to the Polish Alphabet if you don’t believe us ‒ things go downhill once they’re lumped together into actual words.
The most troublesome feature of Polish orthography is what linguists call complex consonant clusters ‒ series of consonants without any vowels. They occur in many languages, including English; for example, in the word ‘shrug’, the letters shr form a consonant cluster. But while English usually draws the line at three consonants, Polish sometimes joins as many as five consonants, a phenomenon called the Polish syllable structure, which is allegedly surpassed only by Georgian in terms of complexity.
It's really easy words. Try some ours: https://theculturetrip.com/europe/poland/articles/the-10-most-difficult-polish-towns-to-pronounce/ (they're not hard at all if you grew up here, and these Englishy pronouciations in the article aren't even remotely correct ironically)
Vid related: https://youtube.com/watch?v=AfKZclMWS1U
https://culture.pl/en/article/the-9-most-unpronounceable-words-in-polish
Georgia just applied to the EU btw (and it's already approved).