Twenty questions, about five minutes, and an honest estimate of where your Portuguese sits on the CEFR scale — whether you learned it in Lisbon or in São Paulo.
Olá, eu ___ a 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. |
Portuguese makes frequent use of the future subjunctive and the inflected infinitive, two important challenges for learners. In a prospective context, quando tiver tempo means when I have time in the future; quando tenho tempo is grammatical for a habit. The inflected infinitive lets a verb mark its own subject, as in para nós sairmos. Portuguese shares the inflected infinitive with Galician, so it is not unique among Romance languages. These constructions deserve attention even if you already know Spanish.
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 — CAPLE (CIPLE, DEPLE, DIPLE, DAPLE, DUPLE) 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 Portuguese 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 Portuguese. 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.
Decide early which side of the Atlantic you are learning, because pronunciation and everyday vocabulary diverge more than grammar does, and mixing them wholesale is what makes learners hard to follow. Then build a stock of sentences about your own week, get the simple past solid, and spend real time listening: European Portuguese in particular swallows unstressed vowels, so what you read and what you hear feel like two languages until your ear adjusts.
The step up is the subjunctive, and in Portuguese that means all three of them. The future subjunctive is the one learners skip, yet it appears in the most ordinary sentences — se precisares, quando puderes, assim que chegarmos. Collect the sentences where you hesitated this week, fix them once, then drill them aloud until quando tiver arrives without a decision.
What is left is register and idiom. Clitic placement varies by variety and context: Brazilian conversation often places pronouns before the verb, while European Portuguese also regularly uses placement after the verb in speech, subject to its placement rules. Read a daily paper, listen to material made for natives, harvest expressions like levar adiante or pôr em causa, 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 |
|---|---|---|
| CAPLE (CIPLE, DEPLE, DIPLE, DAPLE, DUPLE) | University of Lisbon | The five certificates listed cover CEFR levels A2 to C2. CAPLE certificates are used as evidence of Portuguese proficiency; the required certificate depends on the application. |
| Celpe-Bras | Brazilian Ministry of Education | An official Brazilian Portuguese proficiency exam with four certification bands: Intermediate, Upper Intermediate, Advanced and Advanced Superior. Candidates below the minimum Intermediate threshold receive no certificate. |
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 CAPLE (CIPLE, DEPLE, DIPLE, DAPLE, DUPLE) exam. If you need to know whether to open a B1 or a B2 book tonight, five minutes here is enough.
Is this test for European or Brazilian Portuguese?
Both. Every question is built on structures shared by the two standards, and any item whose correct answer depended on one side of the Atlantic was rewritten. You may notice European spelling in the passages; nothing in the answers turns on it.
How accurate is this Portuguese 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 what you need to choose your next book or course.
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. The CAPLE certificates follow it level by level; Celpe-Bras uses its own bands, which map onto it approximately.
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.
I speak Spanish. Will that inflate my result?
On the easy items, yes, and that is fair: your Spanish genuinely does transfer. The questions that will find you out are the future subjunctive, the inflected infinitive and the false friends, which is precisely where Spanish speakers produce confident Portuguese that no Portuguese speaker would write.
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 Portuguese usually means solid comprehension and cautious production. The way up is volume of real sentences with native audio and spaced repetition, built around what you personally need to say — which is how Hyperpolyglot works, instead of handing you another themed word list.
Can I retake the test?
As often as you like, but the questions never change, so an immediate retake measures memory rather than Portuguese. Leave a few weeks between attempts for the comparison to mean anything.
Check how long Portuguese 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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