A simple guide to pronouncing Polish for English speakers, plus a basic Glossary for mountains.
Polish is said to be one of the five hardest languages to learn. Firstly it uses genders - every noun can have a masculine, feminine, or indeterminate gender. A noun or adjective can have its gender changed depending on the gender of the dominating noun it is being applied to. Masculine gender also has personal/impersonal, and animate/inanimate. Noun and adjective cases are similar to latin (nominative, vocative, accusative, genitive, dative, instrumental and locative), in singular and plural. Then verbs can also be flexed (where prefixes or suffixes changed) by gender, tense, aspect, mood and voice. Sentences can have their words put in just about any order, chosen by the speaker, and still retain their meaning. Speakers also can use grammar and flexing from extinct or outlying dialects, and will often make use of neologisms. And that is just the basics. See Wikipedia for more details.
However, Polish has relatively simple pronunciation. Unlike English, where the classic "ough" has ten different pronunciations, Polish spellings actually have quite rigid rules, making it fairly easy to work out how to pronounce a word from its spelling.
Note that this really is approximate; it does not take long or short consonants into account. It is based on British English, and a little French.
In normal Polish, emphasis is put on the syllable one before last:
In the Highlander/Góralski dialect of Polish, the first syllable is the only one that is emphasised. Some areas have names from both normal and Highlander/Góralski (such as szczyt and wierch both being used in Tatry). You will need to know which dialect a word comes from in order to produce the correct emphasis.
Since just about nobody understands IPA (pronunciation described using Unicode characters) until they have had proper training, it is better to provide pronunciation in a language the reader does understand. Since you are reading this page, that means you must understand English. This tool attempts to prepare phonetic pronunciations of Polish using (British) English spellings.
It has several limitations, such as not being able to highlight emphasized syllables. It uses j(e) for the French letter j, and o(n) for the French sound on. It also liberally scatters apostrophes everywhere - this is not to denote syllables, it only serves to prevent English letters modifying each other (such as the E in "made" from changing the A from "a" into "ay"). Please do not read them as syllables.
There is not a one-to-one mapping between the spellings in Polish, and the possible phonetic spellings in English. Do not expect the pronunciation to be perfect - use the list above for more details of the Polish pronunciations. However, this tool should give you something that is a lot closer to the correct pronunciation than you would get if you tried reading the Polish directly as if the letters were English letters (which seems to be what usually happens).