Twenty questions, about five minutes, and an honest estimate of where your Romanian sits on the CEFR scale, from first phrases to near-native.
Bună, eu ___ Ana. Și 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. |
Romanian is the Romance language that kept the case endings its cousins lost, and that shapes the whole learning curve. The definite article is glued to the end of the noun rather than placed in front, carte becomes cartea, and possession requires a genitive form, so cartea elevului does work that Spanish or Italian would hand to a preposition. The other divider is the subjunctive, used far more freely than elsewhere in the family: where French takes an infinitive, Romanian usually takes să plus a conjugated verb.
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 — Romanian language proficiency certificate 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 Romanian 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 Romanian. 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.
Learn every noun with its gender and its definite form, since the article rides on the end of the word and the genitive is built from it. If you already know another Romance language, use the shared vocabulary freely, but check the Slavic borrowings that fill everyday speech, da, prieten, a citi, which look like nothing in Spanish or Italian.
Your step up is the subjunctive with să, which Romanian uses where other Romance languages use an infinitive: vreau să merg rather than vreau a merge. Add the genitive and dative forms of nouns, which carry possession and indirect objects. Collect the sentences you hesitated over this week, correct them once, and drill them aloud.
What remains is register and idiom: constructions such as oricât ar fi insistat, fixed pairs like a prinde viață or a pune în discuție, and the Latinate vocabulary that journalism prefers over its everyday synonyms. Read Romanian newspapers and cultural magazines, listen to radio made for Romanians, and rebuild each expression around your own life.
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 |
|---|---|---|
| Romanian language proficiency certificate | Ariel Centre for Foreign Languages, University of Bucharest | The centre assesses Romanian proficiency and issues CEFR-based certificates. Some faculties accept them for admission; confirm the required level and accepted certificate with your chosen institution. |
| Preparatory year certificate | Romanian universities | A preparatory programme for international students who need Romanian before degree study. Language requirements and admission conditions depend on the institution and programme; completing the language year does not by itself guarantee a degree place. |
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 Romanian language proficiency certificate 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 Romanian level test?
This is an informal estimate based on twenty fixed questions, not a validated placement exam or a certificate. It samples written grammar, vocabulary and reading; it does not assess speaking, listening or writing. Use it to guide practice and check your level with the institution concerned when you need formal proof.
Does it cover Moldovan too?
Yes, in the sense that Moldovan is the same language: the standard written form is identical, and the test avoids any item whose answer would depend on regional vocabulary.
I speak Spanish or Italian. How much transfers?
A great deal of vocabulary and the verb logic, but not the noun system. The suffixed article and the genitive endings have no equivalent in the western Romance languages, and they appear in almost every sentence, which is where confident Spanish speakers lose points here.
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. Romanian universities issue their language certificates on that scale.
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 Romanian usually means you are understood and your noun endings wobble. 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 Romanian. Leave a few weeks between attempts if you want a meaningful comparison.
Check how long Romanian 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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