Twenty questions, about five minutes, and an honest estimate of where your Italian sits on the CEFR scale — from first phrases to near-native.
Ciao, io ___ Ana. E 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. |
Italian rewards beginners faster than almost any language an English speaker can pick: the spelling is phonetic, so you can read aloud on day one and be understood. The levels then turn on two things that look small and are not. The subjunctive carries opinion, doubt and politeness, so avoiding it makes you sound blunt rather than merely simple, and the pronoun pile-ups natives love — glielo, ce n'è, me ne vado — are what separate a fluent B2 from a textbook B1.
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 — CILS 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 Italian 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 Italian. 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.
Your advantage is pronunciation, so use it: read aloud daily from the first week, because Italian spelling is relatively regular. Use audio or a dictionary to check details that ordinary spelling often leaves unmarked, including stress and open versus closed e and o. On paper, focus on the passato prossimo with both auxiliaries and on the verbs that behave backwards for an English speaker, starting with piacere, where the thing you like is the subject.
You can be understood and you still sound like a tourist. Two things change that: the subjunctive, which Italians use constantly to soften and to give opinions, and combined pronouns, which are the difference between Dammi il libro and Dammelo. Collect the sentences you failed to produce this week, correct them once, and drill them aloud until the pronouns stop needing thought.
What remains is idiom and register: fare, mettere and andare carry hundreds of fixed expressions that no rule generates, and written Italian is markedly more formal than spoken. Read a newspaper daily, listen to podcasts made for Italians rather than learners, harvest the phrasings that surprise you, and turn each into a sentence about your own life so it returns 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 |
|---|---|---|
| CILS | University for Foreigners of Siena | One exam per CEFR level, A1 to C2, recognised by the Italian state and valid for life. Widely used for university entry and residence files. |
| CELI | University for Foreigners of Perugia | The other state-recognised certificate, also organised level by level, with a version aimed at learners who need Italian for work. |
| PLIDA | Società Dante Alighieri | Level-by-level diplomas from the cultural body with the widest international network, accepted by Italian authorities for residence applications. |
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 CILS 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 Italian 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 they do reliably is bracket you between two CEFR levels, which is enough to choose a book, a class or a podcast.
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. CILS, CELI and PLIDA are all organised by those levels, and Italian residence rules quote them directly.
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 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 the test use regional Italian?
No. Every question is built on standard Italian, the language of national media and of every certificate. Regional forms and dialects are deliberately absent, since they would measure where you learned rather than how much you know.
Why does the subjunctive appear so often?
Because it is the honest dividing line in Italian. Plenty of learners reach a large vocabulary while still avoiding penso che sia, and the avoidance is audible. Testing it says more about your real level than another round of irregular past participles would.
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 where Italian learners stall comfortably: enough to order, travel and be liked, not enough to argue or joke. 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 Italian. Leave a few weeks between attempts if you want the comparison to mean something.
Check how long Italian 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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