Twenty questions, about five minutes, and an estimate of your Mandarin grammar, vocabulary and reading on the CEFR scale, with context on how HSK comparisons differ.
你好，我 ___ 安娜。 (Nǐ hǎo, wǒ ___ Ānnà.)
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. |
Mandarin inverts the usual difficulty curve: the grammar is the friendliest part, with no conjugation, no gender and no agreement, while the writing system and the tones absorb the hours. That is why level in Chinese is mostly a question of characters and of a handful of structures English has no equivalent for — the 把 construction, resultative and directional complements, and the aspect particle 了, which is not a past tense however often it is taught as one.
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 — HSK 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 Chinese 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 Chinese. 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.
Spend your effort on tones and characters now, not later. Tones learned wrong are re-learned twice as slowly, and characters postponed become the reason people quit at intermediate. Learn each character inside a word you will actually use, get 了 straight as an aspect marker rather than a past tense, and read aloud daily so the tones live in sentences instead of in flashcards.
This is where Chinese grammar finally has something to teach you: the 把 construction, resultative complements such as 听懂 and 写完, and directional complements like 跑进去. These are what make a sentence sound Chinese rather than translated, and they are invisible in a word list. Collect the sentences you could not produce this week, correct them once, and drill them aloud.
Reading speed and familiarity with different registers can become important goals. Modern Chinese uses common conjunctions such as 尽管, everyday idiomatic expressions such as 站不住脚, and four-character chengyu such as 一丝不苟. These categories overlap in use rather than belonging exclusively to literary language. Read a daily paper, note expressions you encounter repeatedly, and reuse them in sentences about your own work.
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 |
|---|---|---|
| HSK | Chinese Testing International (CTI), examination operator | HSK is used for university admission and scholarships in China. For the six-level HSK introduced in 2010, Hanban presented levels 1–6 as A1–C2, but the Fachverband Chinesisch disputed that alignment and placed HSK 4 at A2 and HSK 6 at B2. These are conflicting comparisons, not established equivalences; check which HSK version and score an institution requires. |
| TOCFL | Steering Committee for the Test of Proficiency, Taiwan | The Taiwanese proficiency test is explicitly aligned with CEFR levels. Candidates can choose traditional or simplified characters when registering. |
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 HSK exam. If you need to know whether to open a B1 or a B2 book tonight, five minutes here is enough.
How does this compare with the HSK?
There is no universally accepted conversion. For the six-level HSK introduced in 2010, Hanban linked HSK 4 to B2, while the Fachverband Chinesisch argued for A2. HSK assesses language skills and publishes proficiency descriptions; its coverage depends on the level and version. This short quiz samples written grammar, vocabulary and reading, so its CEFR estimate cannot predict an HSK score.
Do I need to read characters to take the test?
All Chinese text in A1 and A2 items has pinyin support, including the answer options where they are in Chinese. From B1 onward, the questions require reading simplified characters without pinyin. Transliteration helps beginners, but this remains a written quiz rather than a listening or speaking test.
Simplified or traditional characters?
The test uses simplified characters, as used in mainland China and Singapore. Learners familiar with traditional characters will recognise some forms, but others differ, such as 一个/一個 and 看见了/看見了. Beyond the beginner items with pinyin support, you need to read simplified characters.
Are tones tested?
Not directly, because this is a reading-based quiz. That is a real limit: tones are where most learners of Mandarin actually stand or fall, and no written test can see them. Treat a good result here as a statement about your grammar and vocabulary, not about how you sound.
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?
Use the result as a starting point for practice, rather than an HSK equivalent. Build reading fluency and grammar control with real sentences, native audio and spaced repetition based on what you personally need to say, which is 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 Chinese. Leave a few weeks between attempts if you want the comparison to mean something.
Check how long Chinese 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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