Measuring level and progress

Feel is the worst measure of level there is. Mine always says one of two things: "I'm making no progress" or "I must be good now". Both are wrong, at different times.

So I switched to measuring a few concrete things.

The CEFR scale, in plain terms

CEFR is the six-level scale used in Europe, A1 to C2. The official descriptions read rather dryly, so here is my own translation into things you can do:

Level	What you can do
A1	Understand greetings and short directions. Say a few disconnected sentences about yourself.
A2	Get by shopping and asking directions. Read signs and short messages.
B1	Follow slow conversation on familiar topics. Write a simple email. This is the "usable" mark.
B2	Follow most of a film. Hold an argument. Read the news without constant lookups. Most jobs want this.
C1	Understand nearly everything, including fast speech. Write long, coherent texts.
C2	Catch nuance, jokes, wordplay. Very few learners get here, and it is rarely needed.

B2 is the mark worth aiming for

I'd suggest making B2 the target, not C2.

B2 is where English stops getting in your way: you can work, watch films, read books. Going from B2 to C1 costs a great many more hours for a much smaller gain.

Once you reach B2, just live in English and C1 arrives on its own.

How many hours it takes

Cambridge publishes an estimate of the cumulative guided learning hours for each level, starting from zero:

Level	Cumulative hours
A1	60–80
A2	180–200
B1	350–400
B2	500–600
C1	700–800
C2	1,000–1,200

Read these numbers carefully — I once read them far too optimistically.

These are guided hours, meaning classroom time plus homework — time designed to teach you. An hour of podcast while washing up does not count as an hour in that table.

And it is an estimate for European learners. Vietnamese is much further from English: a different sound system, a different rhythm, no inflection. I think Vietnamese speakers should add a fair amount to every number in that table.

Don't use this table to grade yourself

I once divided up my total study hours and concluded "so I'm at B2". Wrong.

This table answers "how far is left", not "where am I". To find out where you are, measure what you can do — see below.

Four self-tests I run monthly

The nice thing about these four is that nobody has to grade them, and all four take about half an hour.

1. Listening — a new episode, no subtitles, 10 minutes

Afterwards, score yourself: how much of the plot did I follow? Write down a percentage.

Important: it must be an unseen episode, and the same series across months so it is comparable.

2. Reading — a new page, count unfamiliar words

Pick one fixed book as your ruler. Open a page at random, underline every word you are unsure of, count.

That number should fall over time. From 15 to 6 is a bigger step than it feels like.

3. Speaking — two minutes without stopping, recorded

Hit record, talk about any topic for exactly two minutes, never pausing more than three seconds.

Listen back and count: how many times did I stall looking for a word?

4. Writing — 200 words in 20 minutes, no lookups

Count the words you produce in 20 minutes. Then reread it the next day and count the errors you find yourself.

Both numbers mean something: word count measures speed, self-found errors measure your ability to self-correct.

I put those eight numbers in a spreadsheet, one row a month. No analysis, just recording.

Why recording matters more than measuring

Any single month is meaningless. Some months you are tired, some you are busy, and the numbers dip.

But look at six consecutive rows and the trend is obvious, and it almost always goes up — including in the months where the feeling told me I was standing still.

When to actually sit an exam

I'd only take one for an external reason: a job, studying abroad, a visa.

Sitting an exam to "find out where I am" is an expensive way to buy information the four tests above give you for free.

If you do have to take one, split it cleanly: build the base through listening and reading, then give the final 8–12 weeks to test technique. Test technique is its own subject, and it does not make your English better — it makes your score better, and those are two different things.

Sources for this page

Cambridge English. How long does it take to learn a language? — the guided learning hours per level.
Council of Europe. CEFR level descriptions — the official A1–C2 descriptions.

The four self-tests above are my own invention, not taken from any research. They do not measure an absolute level — they only measure you this month against you last month, which is what I needed.