What Is My German Level? Free 40-Question CEFR Test

The 40 questions climb in difficulty as you go, opening with everyday A1 vocabulary and closing with C2-level nuance — idiomatic phrasing, subordinate-clause structure, and register shifts that trip up even confident learners. Along the way you'll read short passages drawn from the kind of German you actually encounter — emails, notices, short articles — and answer questions on what they mean, not just what the individual words are. Grammar items focus on the parts of German that most reliably separate one CEFR level from the next: case endings, verb conjugation and position, separable verbs, and word order in subordinate clauses. There's no filler and no trick questions — every item targets one specific ability at one specific level.

The test is written in neutral working German — the register used in German offices, official documents, and everyday exchanges across Germany, not a regional dialect or a textbook's idealized dialogue. Where a question turns on address form, it follows real usage: du for everyday, informal items and Sie for workplace and formal ones, matching how the choice actually plays out in professional German. Standard orthography — including ß — is part of what's measured, since recognizing it correctly is part of literate written German. No question is decided by a ß-versus-ss distinction alone, so a reader used to Swiss German conventions, which drop ß entirely, isn't penalized for a spelling convention rather than a language gap.

Your result is a snapshot you can act on immediately: a CEFR level with a plain-language description of what it means in practice, plus a sense of where your strengths and gaps sit within it. That's useful whether you're sizing up your German before a job application in the DACH region, deciding which class level to enroll in, or just tracking progress since you last checked. Want to retake it later? The test draws from 5 parallel forms at matched difficulty, so a second attempt gives you a genuinely different set of questions — not the same 40 items with the answers half-remembered — while still landing on the same CEFR scale.