Twenty questions, about five minutes, and an honest estimate of where your German sits on the CEFR scale — from first phrases to near-native.
Hallo, ich ___ Ana. Und du?
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. |
German front-loads its difficulty, which is why so many learners quit at A2 and why the ones who survive accelerate. Cases and the three genders have to be automatic before anything else works, since der, den and dem are not decoration but the sentence's wiring. What separates B2 from C1 is rarely vocabulary: it is word order under pressure, the verb that must land at the end of a subordinate clause while you are still deciding what to say.
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 — Goethe-Zertifikat 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 German 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 900 classroom hours in German. 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 | 80–120 h | Introduce yourself, order, ask prices, survive a short trip. |
| A2 | 200–260 h | Talk about your day, your past and your plans in simple sentences. |
| B1 | 400–500 h | Hold a conversation on familiar topics and travel without falling back on English. |
| B2 | 650–850 h | Argue a point, follow films and news, work in the language. |
| C1 | 1,000–1,200 h | Express yourself precisely on abstract topics and catch implied meaning. |
| C2 | 1,300 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.
Do not try to learn genders later: learn every noun with its article from the first day, as one word, because retrofitting der, die and das onto a thousand nouns is the single most miserable job in German. Build a stock of sentences about your own week, drill the Perfekt until it is automatic, and accept that the first hundred hours feel disproportionately hard for the payoff.
You have the grammar on paper and lose it in real time. The fix is speed: subordinate clauses where the verb waits until the end, reflexive verbs with their fixed prepositions, and Konjunktiv II for the polite register that adults actually use. Write out the sentences you failed to say this week, correct them once, then say them aloud until the word order stops needing a decision.
Your remaining gap is idiom and register: nominal style in written German, particles like doch, mal and eben that carry the whole attitude of a sentence, and verb-plus-noun collocations such as zustande kommen or in Frage stellen. Read Zeit or Spiegel, listen to Deutschlandfunk, harvest the phrasings that surprise you, and rebuild each one around your own life so it comes back when you need it.
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 |
|---|---|---|
| Goethe-Zertifikat | Goethe-Institut | One exam per CEFR level, A1 to C2, recognised worldwide and valid for life. The default choice for study and work in Germany. |
| TestDaF | TestDaF-Institut | Aimed at university entry: you sit one exam and receive a level per skill, roughly B2 to C1, rather than a pass or fail. |
| telc Deutsch | telc gGmbH | Level-by-level German certificates used for study, employment and administrative purposes; the required certificate depends on the institution or procedure. |
| Deutsch-Test für Zuwanderer (DTZ) | g.a.s.t. | The A2–B1 examination used at the end of integration courses, administered by g.a.s.t. since January 2023. |
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 Goethe-Zertifikat exam. If you need to know whether to open a B1 or a B2 book tonight, five minutes here is enough.
How accurate is this German level test?
It gives you a range, not a certificate. Twenty fixed questions cannot place you as precisely as an adaptive exam, and they cannot hear you speak. What it does reliably is bracket you between two CEFR levels, which is what you need to pick a course or a book.
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. Every Goethe-Zertifikat maps onto one of them, and German residence rules are written in the same letters.
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. The total becomes a percentage, then a range.
Does it cover Austrian and Swiss German?
The test is built on standard written German, which is shared across Germany, Austria and Switzerland. No answer depends on regional vocabulary, and dialect is deliberately absent — it would tell you about where you learned, not how much you know.
Why are there so many questions about cases?
Because cases are where German level actually shows. Article and pronoun endings encode who does what to whom, so a learner who guesses them is guessing the meaning of the sentence. Vocabulary size can hide a lot in German; case accuracy cannot be faked.
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 German plateau: enough to survive, not enough to be yourself. The way through is volume of real sentences with native audio and spaced repetition, built around the things you personally need to say — which is what Hyperpolyglot does, rather than handing you another vocabulary list.
Can I retake the test?
As often as you like, but the questions never change, so an immediate retake measures memory rather than German. Leave a few weeks between attempts if you want a meaningful comparison.
Check how long German will take you, see how close it is to languages you already speak, or take the which language should I learn quiz.
Hyperpolyglot