Twenty questions, about five minutes, and an honest estimate of where your Catalan sits on the CEFR scale: from beginner to advanced questions.
Hola, jo ___ l'Anna. I tu?
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. |
Catalan is a Romance language with vocabulary and structures that Spanish and French speakers may recognise. Weak pronouns need particular attention: en and hi combine with other pronouns in forms such as l'hi and me'n. Another distinctive structure is the periphrastic past, where vaig veure means I saw. Pronunciation and some pronoun combinations vary across standard varieties.
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 — Certificats de català 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 Catalan 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 600 to 750 classroom hours in the languages closest to Catalan on its scale, which does not list Catalan itself. 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 | 60–100 h | Introduce yourself, order, ask prices, survive a short trip. |
| A2 | 150–200 h | Talk about your day, your past and your plans in simple sentences. |
| B1 | 300–400 h | Hold a conversation on familiar topics and travel without falling back on English. |
| B2 | 500–650 h | Argue a point, follow films and news, work in the language. |
| C1 | 800–950 h | Express yourself precisely on abstract topics and catch implied meaning. |
| C2 | 1,000 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.
If you already speak Spanish or French, read early and often, because comprehension will run ahead of everything else. Put your active effort into pronunciation, since Catalan has vowel reductions and final consonants that Spanish does not, and into the periphrastic past, which is the first structure that stops a Spanish speaker sounding like a Spanish speaker.
Weak pronouns are the wall. En, hi, ho and their combinations replace whole phrases, and avoiding them is the clearest sign of a learner. Work through them one at a time with real sentences rather than tables, add the subjunctive, and collect the sentences you could not build this week to correct once and drill aloud.
What remains is register and the pressure of Spanish. Formal Catalan uses constructions such as per molt que hagués insistit and collocations like tirar endavant, while everyday speech in many places borrows Spanish turns of phrase that written Catalan rejects. Read Ara or Vilaweb, listen to Catalunya Ràdio, and rebuild each construction around your own life.
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 |
|---|---|---|
| Certificats de català | Departament de Política Lingüística, Generalitat de Catalunya | Official certificates covering A1 to C2. Public sector posts may require a particular certificate or a recognised equivalent; check the requirements of the relevant post. |
| Exams of the Institut Ramon Llull | Institut Ramon Llull | The international route outside the Catalan-speaking area, with certificates from A2 to C2. Available levels depend on the examination centre and session. |
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 Certificats de català exam. If you need to know whether to open a B1 or a B2 book tonight, five minutes here is enough.
Is Catalan just a dialect of Spanish?
No. Catalan is a separate Romance language with its own history, literature and official certificates. It shares features with Occitan, Spanish and other Romance languages. How much a reader understands depends on their experience and exposure.
Which variety does the test use?
Standard Catalan as used in Catalonia, which is also the basis of the official certificates. Valencian and Balearic varieties have their own accepted forms, including differences in endings, vocabulary and pronoun combinations. The test follows Catalonia conventions; other standard varieties may use different accepted forms.
How accurate is this Catalan level test?
This is a short, informal estimate based on grammar, vocabulary and reading. Twenty fixed questions cannot establish an official CEFR level or assess speaking, listening and writing. Use the result to choose practice material, and take an official examination if you need certified proof.
I speak Spanish. How much transfers?
Related vocabulary and grammatical structures can help you start reading. Weak pronouns, the periphrastic past and pronunciation still need focused practice. This written test samples grammar, vocabulary and reading; it does not assess your pronunciation.
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, 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?
Use the result as a starting point. Review the structures you missed and practise sentences with native audio and spaced repetition, built around what you personally need to say. Hyperpolyglot helps you build that practice habit.
Can I retake the test?
As often as you like, but the questions never change, so an immediate retake measures memory rather than Catalan. Leave a few weeks between attempts if you want a meaningful comparison.
Check how long Catalan 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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