Twenty questions, about five minutes, and an honest estimate of where your Korean sits — on the CEFR scale, with the TOPIK equivalent spelled out.
안녕하세요, 저는 아나 ___. (Annyeonghaseyo, jeoneun 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. |
Korean gives you the easiest start of any hard language and the steepest middle. Hangul is genuinely learnable in a weekend, so beginners read almost immediately, and then the real work begins: verb endings that stack, and a speech-level system where the same sentence exists in half a dozen politeness registers. Your level in Korean is mostly decided by two things — how many connective endings you control, and whether you can move between 해요체, 하십시오체 and 해체 without thinking.
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 — TOPIK 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 Korean 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 Korean. 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.
Learn Hangul properly in the first week, including the batchim rules that change how a syllable sounds when the next one begins with a vowel — skipping them is why some learners never quite hear the language they can read. Then build sentences about your own week, and treat the polite 해요 form as your default rather than learning plain forms first.
Your bottleneck is connective endings. Korean joins clauses with suffixes rather than conjunctions, so -는데, -니까, -면서 and -(으)ㄹ수록 are what turn a list of short sentences into speech. Collect the moments where you stopped mid-sentence this week, rebuild them with a connective, and drill them aloud until the ending arrives without a decision.
What is left is register and Sino-Korean vocabulary. Formal writing and news lean heavily on Chinese-derived words that never appear in conversation classes, and business Korean runs on humble forms such as 찾아뵙겠습니다. Read news, watch dramas with adult office settings, and collect the set phrases that separate correct Korean from usable Korean.
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 |
|---|---|---|
| TOPIK | National Institute for International Education, Korea | The reference certificate, with TOPIK I covering levels 1 to 2 and TOPIK II levels 3 to 6. Required for university entry and many visas. Roughly, level 1 to 2 sit around A1 to A2, levels 3 and 4 around B1 to B2, levels 5 and 6 around C1. |
| KLAT | Korea Language Ability Test organisers | A less common alternative, also scored by level, occasionally accepted by employers alongside the TOPIK. |
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 TOPIK 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 TOPIK?
The TOPIK is the certificate universities and visa offices ask for; this is a five-minute estimate. As a rough map, TOPIK levels 1 and 2 sit around A1 and A2, levels 3 and 4 around B1 and B2, levels 5 and 6 around C1. TOPIK I tests listening and reading; TOPIK II also tests writing, which this multiple-choice quiz does not assess.
Do I need to read Hangul to take the test?
The beginner questions include romanisation, so your grammar is measured rather than your reading speed. From B1 the passages are in Hangul alone, because by then reading is part of the level rather than a separate hurdle.
How accurate is this Korean 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 pick your next course or textbook.
Why are politeness levels tested?
Because in Korean they are grammar, not etiquette. The same verb has different endings for a friend, a stranger and a client, and choosing the wrong one is a social error rather than a stylistic one. It is one of the clearest markers separating an advanced learner from an intermediate one.
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 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, or around TOPIK 3. What should I do next?
TOPIK 3 is the stall point: dramas are followable, conversations are exhausting. The way through 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 Korean. Leave a few weeks between attempts if you want a meaningful comparison.
Check how long Korean 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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