Twenty questions, about five minutes, and an honest estimate of where your English sits on the CEFR scale — with the IELTS and TOEFL equivalents spelled out.
Hello, I ___ Ana. And you?
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. |
English has almost no inflection, which makes the first levels unusually quick and the last ones unusually slow. Once the grammar runs out, level is carried by things no table can list: phrasal verbs, where put off and put up with share a verb and nothing else; collocations, which decide that you reach an agreement rather than take one; and articles, whose logic defeats speakers of Slavic and East Asian languages for years. The highest levels turn on register and implication rather than on rules.
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 — IELTS 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 English 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 English on its scale, which does not list English 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.
Build a base of sentences you would actually say, not isolated words, and get the irregular past forms solid early, since English narrates constantly in the past simple. Listening deserves more time than most beginners give it: written English and spoken English differ enough in rhythm that reading well is no guarantee of understanding a conversation.
This is where most learners of English stall for years, because B1 is already enough to get by. The way out is phrasal verbs and collocations, which carry most of everyday speech and cannot be derived from rules. Add the perfect tenses, which mark relevance rather than time. Collect the sentences you failed to say this week, correct them once, and drill them aloud.
Your remaining gap is register and precision. Formal English uses inversion, the mandative subjunctive and a Latinate vocabulary that speech avoids, while fluent conversation runs on idiom and understatement. Read a serious newspaper daily, listen to interviews and comedy, and keep a list of the phrasings that surprised you rather than the words you did not know.
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 |
|---|---|---|
| IELTS | British Council, IDP and Cambridge | Scored from 1 to 9 rather than pass or fail, and used for study, work and migration. Roughly, band 4 to 5 sits around B1, band 5.5 to 6.5 around B2, band 7 to 8 around C1 and band 8.5 upwards around C2. |
| TOEFL iBT | ETS | Favoured by North American universities. ETS changed the score scale in 2026, so check the current mapping on the ETS site rather than trusting an older score-to-CEFR table; historically the upper part of the 0–120 range corresponded to B2 and C1. |
| Cambridge English qualifications | Cambridge University Press and Assessment | One exam per level, from A2 Key through B2 First to C2 Proficiency, valid for life and mapped directly onto the CEFR. |
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 IELTS 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 IELTS or TOEFL?
Those are certificates that universities and immigration authorities accept; this is a five-minute estimate. IELTS band 5.5 to 6.5 corresponds roughly to B2 and band 7 to 8 to C1. For TOEFL, ETS revised its scale in 2026, so take the mapping from ETS directly. Both official exams also test speaking and writing, which no quiz can measure.
How accurate is this English level test?
It gives you a range, not a certificate. Twenty fixed questions cannot place you as precisely as an adaptive exam such as the Oxford Placement Test, which asks 40 to 45 questions. What this does reliably is bracket you between two CEFR levels.
Is it British or American English?
Both. Every question is built on structures shared by the two standards, and any item whose correct answer depended on one side of the Atlantic was rewritten. Spelling in the passages is British; nothing in the answers turns on it.
What is the CEFR scale?
The Common European Framework of Reference splits ability into six levels: A1 and A2 for the basic user, B1 and B2 for the independent user, C1 and C2 for the proficient user. Cambridge exams map onto it directly, and most European employers quote it.
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?
B1 is the great English plateau: enough to travel, work and be understood, not enough to be yourself. The way up is volume of real sentences with native audio and spaced repetition, built around what you personally 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 English. Leave a few weeks between attempts if you want a meaningful comparison.
Check how long English 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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