Parleo
The letters and numbers weren't invented by courses. It's the European CEFR scale, which describes proficiency in any language: six stages from A1 to C2. Universities, employers, and international exams rely on it, which is why job postings say "B2" instead of "reads well with a dictionary."
The scale describes not the volume of learned rules, but what a person can do. The formulations begin with phrases like "can understand," "can explain," "can maintain a conversation."
Six stages in human terms
A1, beginner. You greet, introduce yourself, order coffee, understand short simple phrases if the interlocutor speaks slowly. Vocabulary of about five hundred words.
A2, elementary. You talk about yourself, family, and work in simple sentences. You manage in a store, at the airport, at a hotel reception. You understand short texts and announcements.
B1, intermediate. You hold a conversation on a familiar topic, explain your position, describe events and plans. You manage on a trip without preparation. You watch TV series with subtitles and grasp the plot.
B2, upper intermediate. The level requested in job postings. You speak fluently with a native speaker without strain for either side, participate in work discussions, read articles on your topic, write letters and reports.
C1, advanced. You speak fluently and hardly search for words, understand subtext and irony, work in English without relying on your native language.
C2, proficiency.You understand almost everything you hear and read, joke freely, argue, and switch styles.
Old textbook names align with this same scale: Beginner and Elementary are A1 and A2, Pre-Intermediate and Intermediate are A2 and B1, Upper-Intermediate is B2, Advanced is C1.
Why people almost always misjudge their level
People err in both directions, and we see both biases equally often.
Some rate themselves B2 because they understand TV shows and read documentation. But in their first conversation, it turns out that passive comprehension and speech are different skills: everything clicks in their head, but what comes out is "I am work in IT."
Others call themselves A1 after ten years of school and university. They have thousands of words and all the grammar in their arsenal, but they've never spoken aloud and therefore don't trust themselves.
Hence a simple rule: level is measured by speaking and listening. The number of textbooks completed doesn't matter here.
How to check your level
There are three ways, and their accuracy varies.
Official exam. IELTS, TOEFL, Cambridge. Precise, recognised everywhere, costs money and needs preparation for the format. You need one when the result goes into documents. On the speaking part of the first one we have a separate page.
Online test.Fifteen to thirty minutes, mostly grammar and vocabulary. Provides a guideline, but misses the main point: such tests don't ask you to speak.
Conversation.The most honest way. Five minutes of live speech show the level more accurately than an hour of tests, because you can see the speed, pauses, and how a person manages when they lack a word.
What we measure
Parleo has its own short scale: Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced. We make no promises about CEFR: we measure what we use ourselves. The course within the app is structured into these three stages, 24 topics, and 72 lessons.
The check takes three minutes. Fifteen questions, five per stage, in each you need to insert a missing word into a phrase. A stage is considered passed with four correct answers out of five. Phrases are taken from the course itself, so the result immediately tells you which lesson to start from.
The level is further refined during the conversation. For those starting from scratch, Parleo has a separate mode: speech is slower, phrases are shorter, and each line comes with a translation in parentheses. How it works in this mode Speech practice, discussed separately.
How long does a stage take
The generally accepted estimate for exam preparation is about 200 hours of study to move between adjacent stages. From A2 to B1 it's roughly that much, from B1 to B2 it's usually longer.
The number is conditional, but it's useful because it turns the conversation from "when will I learn English" into arithmetic. Forty minutes a day is a little over two hundred hours a year.
But it's not about the hours themselves. The one who speaks them aloud takes the step, not the one who reads the textbook with their eyes. What to do if you are starting from scratch, we discussed week by week.
Fifteen text replies every day and twenty voice replicas for a try — no card and no registration. You press the microphone and speak, Parleo replies with voice and shows mistakes.
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