Lingua
Every course, every job advert and every language certificate speaks in the same six codes: A1, A2, B1, B2, C1, C2. They come from the Common European Framework of Reference, and their one genuinely good idea is that a level is not a grammar list. It is a description of what a person can do with the language.
Key points
- The six levels are three pairs: basic user (A1, A2), independent user (B1, B2), proficient user (C1, C2). Each is defined by what you can do, not by what you have studied.
- A level takes roughly 150 to 300 hours of real work, and the steps get longer as you climb: B2 to C1 is the long one.
- You can place yourself in ten minutes with can-do statements or a short adaptive test, and the answer matters mostly because it tells you what to read and listen to next.
The six levels in plain language
| Level | What you can do | What it feels like |
|---|---|---|
| A1 | Introduce yourself, ask and answer simple questions about where you live, people you know and things you have | Survival phrases, spoken slowly and repeated |
| A2 | Handle routine exchanges: shopping, directions, ordering, describing your background in simple terms | You get through the errand, not the conversation |
| B1 | Deal with most situations while travelling, describe experiences and plans, explain an opinion briefly | The first level that feels like using the language |
| B2 | Follow a conversation between natives, argue a position, read an article without a dictionary on every line | You stop translating in familiar territory |
| C1 | Use the language flexibly at work or at university, understand implicit meaning and long complex texts | Vocabulary is the only regular obstacle |
| C2 | Understand virtually everything you read or hear and express yourself precisely, including nuance and humour | The remaining gap is cultural, not linguistic |
Two things are worth noticing about that table. A1 and A2 are shorter than most people expect, and B1 is where the language becomes useful: it is the level at which a trip stops being a series of gestures. And C2 is not "native". A native speaker with no education in the language would not pass a C2 exam; a C2 speaker will still miss a childhood joke.
How long does a level take?
The framework itself gives no hours, so the numbers below come from the guided-learning-hour estimates course providers publish for English, and they assume that a study hour is real work rather than a video playing in the background.
| From | To | Typical guided hours |
|---|---|---|
| Zero | A1 | 70 to 100 |
| A1 | A2 | 100 to 150 |
| A2 | B1 | 150 to 200 |
| B1 | B2 | 200 to 250 |
| B2 | C1 | 250 to 350 |
| C1 | C2 | 300 and up |
Multiply everything for a distant language. The Foreign Service Institute's estimates put Spanish and French at around 600 to 750 class hours to professional working proficiency for an English speaker, and Japanese, Korean, Chinese and Arabic at about 2,200. The levels are the same; the hours are not. There is more on that in how long it takes to learn a language.
Where people actually get stuck
Almost nobody stalls at A2. The famous wall is B1 to B2, and it is a wall for a structural reason: everything up to B1 is a set of situations you can rehearse, and everything after B1 is the whole language. Your hours stop producing visible jumps and start producing small gains spread across a much larger surface. That is the intermediate plateau, and the way through it is narrower input and more production, not more beginner material.
Three ways to find your level
- Read the can-do statements and be honest. Not "could I recognise this" but "could I do this on Tuesday, tired, with a stranger". The first statement you cannot honestly claim is your ceiling.
- Take a short adaptive test. Twenty to thirty questions that get harder or easier as you answer will put you within one level, which is all you need. Our own level test runs from A1 to C2 and takes about ten minutes.
- Open a page of real text. Native material at your level should be readable with one or two unknown words per hundred. If you meet five, the text is above you, and that is a fine way to sort podcasts and books into "now" and "later".
An exam certificate is a fourth way, and the only one an employer will accept, but it answers a different question. For choosing what to study this month, the ten-minute version is enough.
What the levels are not
They are not a score you can grind. They are not evenly spaced. They are not a measure of vocabulary size, though vocabulary tracks them closely: somewhere around 2,500 word families at B1 and 5,000 at B2 is a common rule of thumb. And they are not a single number: most learners are a level higher in reading than in speaking, and there is nothing wrong with that. Write both down.
In LinguaPair
Every course runs from A0, the writing system, to C2, and the levels in the app are the CEFR ones, so a lesson labelled B1 is aiming at the can-do statements above rather than at a chapter number. The placement test asks between twenty and thirty adaptive questions and puts you on the first lesson you have not mastered, so you do not restart at "hello" because you once studied the language at school. A0 and A1 are free in every course, which is exactly the stretch where a beginner needs to find out whether the language suits them. And if you and your partner are at different levels, the app expects it: each of you has your own course, your own level and your own daily goal, while the streak and the league are shared.