You could say "cze¶ć," which means "hi." (Please change your browser text encoding to Central European, so you can see this word.) Also, I think this question has been asked here many times before and therefore should be in the glossary.

There is a cognate for "hello" in Polish - "halo" - but it is used only when one answers the phone.

Witaj!

Cześć contains two special Polish characters at the end. They look like an s with an apostrophe above and an c with ah apostrophe above.

It may be rather hard to pronounce, as the special characters I told you about have no phonetic equivalent in English.

"Cz" is pronounced like "tch" in ITCH
"e" is pronounced like e in PET
"s" with apostrophe is pronounced like sh in SHEET, but much much softer
"c" with apostrophe is pronounced like ch in in CHEAT, but much much softer

As you see, hard cheese. Chances are you won't get it right the first time, and probably you friend won't understand you anyway.

"Witaj" is much easier. No special characters and you pronounce it something like you would say "vee tie".

Although it is a little bit more formal, it is perfectly acceptable, and much easier on your tongue, as well as your friend's ears...

;-)

Hope it helps, Kelly.