Twenty questions, about five minutes, and an honest estimate of where your Greek sits on the CEFR scale — from first phrases to near-native.
Γεια σου, εγώ ___ η Άννα. Εσύ; (Gia sou, ego ___ i Anna. Esy?)
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. |
The Greek alphabet is a weekend of work and then stops mattering. What decides your level is the case system, since articles, adjectives and nouns all bend together and a wrong ending is heard immediately, and the way Greek builds its verbs. There is no infinitive: where English says I want to go, Greek says the equivalent of I want that I go, so the να construction with its own aspect choice runs through almost every complex sentence you will ever make.
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 — Certificate of Attainment in Greek (Πιστοποιητικό Ελληνομάθειας) 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 Greek 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 1,100 classroom hours in Greek. 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 | 100–150 h | Introduce yourself, order, ask prices, survive a short trip. |
| A2 | 250–350 h | Talk about your day, your past and your plans in simple sentences. |
| B1 | 500–650 h | Hold a conversation on familiar topics and travel without falling back on English. |
| B2 | 850–1,100 h | Argue a point, follow films and news, work in the language. |
| C1 | 1,300–1,600 h | Express yourself precisely on abstract topics and catch implied meaning. |
| C2 | 1,800 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.
Learn the alphabet properly in the first week, including how the letter combinations sound, then learn every noun with its article, because gender decides the endings of everything that agrees with it. Build sentences about your own day, and get the aorist working early — Greek speakers narrate in it constantly, and avoiding it makes ordinary storytelling impossible.
Your ceiling is the να construction and verbal aspect. Greek makes you choose, every time, between an ongoing and a completed form of the verb inside that clause, which is a decision English never asks for. Add clitic pronouns, which pile up before the verb in a fixed order. Collect the sentences you could not finish this week, correct them once, and drill them aloud.
What remains is register, and Greek has a wide one. Constructions such as παρά, εις πέρας and participles used as whole clauses are especially common in formal discourse. They also occur in speech, with frequency and tone depending on the expression and setting. Read Kathimerini, listen to news bulletins, and rebuild each formal construction around your own subject so it is available 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 |
|---|---|---|
| Certificate of Attainment in Greek (Πιστοποιητικό Ελληνομάθειας) | Centre for the Greek Language, Greek Ministry of Education | The state language certificate, offered at levels A1–C2 and used to demonstrate Greek proficiency for purposes such as public sector employment. It is distinct from the Interior Ministry’s ΠΕΓΠ examination for naturalisation, which assesses language and civic knowledge and is subject to exemptions. |
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 Certificate of Attainment in Greek (Πιστοποιητικό Ελληνομάθειας) 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 Greek level test?
This short quiz gives a provisional indication of your grammar and reading performance, not a validated CEFR assessment or a certificate. It does not assess listening, speaking or writing. Use an official examination if you need a certified level.
What is the CEFR scale?
The Common European Framework of Reference describes six levels: A1 and A2 for basic users, B1 and B2 for independent users, and C1 and C2 for proficient users. The Certificate of Attainment in Greek offers examinations at these levels.
Do I need to read the Greek alphabet?
The first questions include a transliteration so a complete beginner can be placed, but the test is otherwise in Greek script. The alphabet takes a weekend and everything else depends on it, so treating it as optional would flatter your result.
Is Ancient Greek any help?
For vocabulary and for reading formal registers, yes, considerably. For everything else, less than people expect: the modern verb system, the loss of the infinitive and the pronunciation have all moved a long way, and classicists routinely find themselves reading Greek they cannot speak.
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 in Greek usually means you can be understood and your endings slip under pressure. 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 Greek. Leave a few weeks between attempts if you want a meaningful comparison.
Check how long Greek 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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