Twenty questions, about five minutes, and an honest estimate of where your Japanese sits — on the CEFR scale, with the JLPT equivalent spelled out.
はじめまして、アナ ___ 。 (Hajimemashite, Ana ___.)
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. |
Japanese levels behave unlike European ones, because three separate systems have to grow at once: grammar, the writing system, and politeness. A learner can hold a warm conversation and still be unable to read a menu, or read a newspaper and freeze when a client asks a question, since keigo is a parallel grammar rather than a layer of vocabulary. Transitive and intransitive pairs are the other quiet divider — the difference between the door opened and I opened the door is a suffix, and getting it wrong reads as a beginner's mistake at any vocabulary size.
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 — JLPT 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 Japanese 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 Japanese. 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.
Fix the writing system before it becomes a wall: hiragana and katakana are two weekends of work and everything downstream depends on them, while kanji are best learned in the words you actually use rather than as isolated characters. On the grammar side, get particles automatic — は against が, に against で — because they carry the roles that English marks with word order.
You can say things, and you say them the way a textbook would. Three things move you on: transitive and intransitive pairs, which decide whether you sound like a learner; the て-form in all its uses, which is the joint every longer sentence turns on; and hearing enough real speech to notice the particles natives drop. Collect the sentences you could not produce this week, correct them once, and drill them aloud.
Your ceiling is now politeness and reading speed. Keigo is not decoration in a working context: 伺います and いらっしゃいます point in opposite directions, and choosing wrong is a social mistake rather than a grammatical one. Read material written for adults, watch dramas set in offices, and collect the set phrases — お世話になっております, 恐れ入りますが — that make the difference between correct Japanese and usable Japanese.
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 |
|---|---|---|
| JLPT | Japan Foundation and JEES | The reference certificate, in five levels from N5 to N1. It tests reading, vocabulary, grammar and listening, but never speaking or writing, so an N1 holder is not automatically a fluent speaker. The JLPT's own published comparison maps results to CEFR bands that depend on your score: roughly N3 to A2 or B1, N2 to B1 or B2, and N1 to B2 or C1. |
| J.TEST and BJT | Association for Testing Japanese; Japan Kanji Aptitude Testing Foundation | Scaled tests rather than pass-or-fail levels, common in hiring. The BJT focuses specifically on Japanese used in business settings, where keigo carries most of the weight. |
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 JLPT 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 JLPT?
The JLPT is the certificate employers ask for; this is a five-minute estimate. The JLPT's own comparison maps scores rather than levels onto the CEFR, so N3 lands around A2 or B1, N2 around B1 or B2 and N1 around B2 or C1 depending on how you scored. Note also that the JLPT tests no speaking or writing at all.
Do I need to read kanji to take the test?
Not at the beginner end: A1 and A2 questions come with romaji, so your grammar is measured rather than your reading. From B1 on, the passages use ordinary kanji, because at that point reading is part of the level rather than a separate skill.
How accurate is this Japanese 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 or watch you write. What they do reliably is bracket you between two CEFR levels.
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.
Why is keigo tested at all?
Because in Japan it decides whether your Japanese is usable at work. Humble and honorific forms point in opposite directions, and reaching for いらっしゃいます about your own colleague while speaking to a client outside the company is a social error that fluent grammar cannot repair. It is a genuine marker of the advanced levels.
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, or around N3. What should I do next?
N3 is where most learners stall: too advanced for beginner material, not yet comfortable with native content. The way through is volume of real sentences with native audio and spaced repetition, built around what you actually 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 Japanese. Leave a few weeks between attempts if you want the comparison to mean something.
Check how long Japanese 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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