Twenty questions in Modern Standard Arabic, about five minutes, and an honest estimate of where you sit on the CEFR scale.
مرحباً، ___ اسمي آنا. (Marḥaban, ___ ismī Ānā.)
No feedback until the end, on purpose: guessing from the corrections would skew your result. Nothing is saved or sent anywhere.
The test places you between two levels of the CEFR, the six-level scale used by universities, employers and official certificates across Europe. A range is the honest output of twenty questions: adaptive tests such as the Oxford Placement Test ask 40 to 45 items, and DIALANG around thirty per skill, precisely because pinning a single level takes far more evidence.
| Level | Name | What you can do |
|---|---|---|
| A1 | Beginner | Introduce yourself, order, ask prices, survive a short trip. |
| A2 | Elementary | Talk about your day, your past and your plans in simple sentences. |
| B1 | Intermediate | Hold a conversation on familiar topics and travel without falling back on English. |
| B2 | Upper intermediate | Argue a point, follow films and news, work in the language. |
| C1 | Advanced | Express yourself precisely on abstract topics and catch implied meaning. |
| C2 | Proficient | Irony, register, specialised texts: near-native command. |
Arabic is really two learning projects at once, and no honest test can pretend otherwise. Modern Standard Arabic is the written and formal language, shared from Morocco to Iraq; the dialects are what people actually speak at home, and a fluent Egyptian speaker may score low on a standard test while reading a newspaper defeats a confident conversationalist. This test measures Modern Standard Arabic, because that is what is shared. Within it, the divide between levels is mood on the verb — the subjunctive after أن, the jussive after لم — and the case endings that print omits and formal speech restores.
People search for all three, and they are not quite the same thing. A proficiency test measures what you can do against a public standard and usually ends in a certificate someone else will read — ALPT is one. A placement test exists to put you in the right class, so it is short, unofficial and only has to be right to within one level. A level test is the everyday name for the same thing when nobody is enrolling you in anything.
This page is a placement test in the technical sense: it estimates your Arabic level on the CEFR scale in about five minutes, tells you which two levels you sit between, and hands you nothing you could show an employer. If you need that, sit one of the exams above. If you need to know which book to open tonight, this is the right tool — and it is free, with no account and no email.
Levels are not evenly spaced: A1 is a few weekends, C1 is a few years. The ranges below are guided-study hours counted cumulatively from zero — orders of magnitude, not promises. They are scaled from the U.S. Foreign Service Institute, which puts professional working proficiency for an English speaker at roughly 2,200 classroom hours in Arabic. Those are hours of intensive, supervised classes, with selected students: read them as a floor rather than a forecast.
| Level | Hours from zero | What it buys you |
|---|---|---|
| A1 | 150–250 h | Introduce yourself, order, ask prices, survive a short trip. |
| A2 | 400–550 h | Talk about your day, your past and your plans in simple sentences. |
| B1 | 800–1,000 h | Hold a conversation on familiar topics and travel without falling back on English. |
| B2 | 1,400–1,800 h | Argue a point, follow films and news, work in the language. |
| C1 | 2,200–2,700 h | Express yourself precisely on abstract topics and catch implied meaning. |
| C2 | 3,000 h+ | Irony, register, specialised texts: near-native command. |
Want the same maths for your own weekly schedule? Our time calculator turns hours into months, and applies a discount if you already speak a related language.
Decide deliberately what you are learning Arabic for, because the answer changes the route: Modern Standard for reading, news and formal settings, a specific dialect for talking to people. Most successful learners do both in parallel, with the script and the verb system from Standard Arabic and the everyday phrases from one dialect. Get the root-and-pattern system into your head early: it turns vocabulary from memorisation into recognition.
The step up is mood and the verb forms. The subjunctive after أن, the jussive after لم and the common verb patterns help you read beyond simple headlines. These patterns show recurring semantic tendencies, but many meanings are lexicalized, so individual verbs still need to be learned. Collect the sentences you could not build this week, correct them once, and read them aloud until the endings arrive automatically.
Your remaining gap is register and the case endings that written Arabic hides. Editorials and literature assume the circumstantial accusative, verbal nouns doing the work of whole clauses, and collocations such as رأى النور that no dictionary entry prepares you for. Read opinion columns daily, listen to formal broadcasts, and rebuild each new construction around your own subject matter.
A placement quiz and a certificate answer different questions. This one tells you what to study next, in five minutes, for free. The exams below tell an employer or a university what you can do, on paper, for a fee and a scheduled date. Use the first to prepare for the second.
| Exam | Awarded by | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| ALPT | Arabic Language Proficiency Test organisers | A scaled proficiency test in Modern Standard Arabic, used by universities and employers, reporting a level rather than a pass or fail. |
| ILR and ACTFL ratings | US government and ACTFL | Not certificates you sit for casually, but the scales most Arabic programmes in the United States report on, and the ones the FSI difficulty figures come from. |
| Dialect certificates | Various universities | No single international certificate covers Egyptian, Levantine or Gulf Arabic. Institutions test them internally, which is why a written certificate says little about how you cope in a Cairo taxi. |
Because the extra thirty would buy you less than you think. A fixed-form test gains precision slowly: what actually separates a serious placement test is adaptivity — picking each question based on how you answered the last one, so nobody wastes time on items far below or far above their level. Without that, doubling the length mostly doubles the boredom, and an abandoned test measures nothing at all.
So this one is deliberately short and deliberately modest: it brackets you between two levels, tells you which skill is dragging, and sends you back to studying. If you need a single certified level on paper, sit a ALPT exam. If you need to know whether to open a B1 or a B2 book tonight, five minutes here is enough.
Does this test Modern Standard Arabic or a dialect?
Modern Standard Arabic, the form shared across the Arab world in writing, news and formal speech. Dialects differ too much for a single fair test: a question that works in Cairo would be wrong in Rabat. If you learned only spoken Levantine or Egyptian, expect a lower score here than your conversational ability suggests.
Do I need to read the Arabic script?
Beginner questions include transliteration so a newcomer can still be placed, but from A2 on the test is in Arabic script. Reading is a genuine part of level in a language whose written form is the shared standard.
How accurate is this Arabic level test?
It gives you a range, not a certificate. Twenty fixed questions cannot place you as precisely as an adaptive test, and they cannot hear you speak. What they do reliably is bracket you between two CEFR levels for Modern Standard Arabic.
Are the case endings needed to answer?
Some questions test nominal case endings, such as the accusative marking a circumstantial expression. Others test verbal mood endings: the subjunctive after أن and the jussive after لم are moods, not noun cases. Everyday written Arabic omits most short vowels; this test supplies relevant endings where they are the point of the question.
How is my level calculated?
Each question is worth the rank of its level, from 1 point for A1 to 6 for C2. A wrong answer gives back a third of that weight, which is exactly what random guessing earns on a four-option question, so guessing is worth nothing on average and skipping costs nothing extra.
Is the test free? Do I need an account?
Completely free, no signup, no email. Your answers stay in your browser and nothing is sent anywhere.
I got B1. What should I do next?
B1 in Arabic usually means you read slowly and speak in a register nobody uses at home. The way up is volume of real sentences with native audio and spaced repetition, built around what you actually need to say — which is exactly how Hyperpolyglot works.
Can I retake the test?
As often as you like, but the questions never change, so an immediate retake measures memory rather than Arabic. Leave a few weeks between attempts if you want a meaningful comparison.
Check how long Arabic will take you, see how close it is to languages you already speak, or take the which language should I learn quiz.
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