What is my Brazilian Portuguese level?
Three minutes of tapping gives you a range — how many Brazilian Portuguese words you recognise, and which CEFR levels that is consistent with. No account, no email, and nothing leaves your browser.
Start the check →400 words and 193 invented ones in the bank.
What the levels mean, in Brazilian Portuguese
CEFR is the Council of Europe's six-level scale, and it is what Portuguese courses, employers and the official exams all quote. The descriptions below are its own; the second column is what each level tends to feel like when the language you are learning is the one spoken in Brazil.
| Level | What the CEFR says you can do | What that feels like |
|---|---|---|
| A1 | Familiar words, very basic phrases, people speaking slowly and clearly to you. | You can catch a greeting, a price, a room number. |
| A2 | Frequent vocabulary about shopping, family, work; short simple texts. | You can follow a slow, graded podcast made for learners. |
| B1 | The main points of clear standard speech on familiar matters. | You can follow a learner podcast at normal speed and get the gist of the news. |
| B2 | Extended speech, TV news, most films in standard dialect. | You can put on Jornal Nacional and follow it without subtitles. |
| C1 | Extended speech even when it is not clearly structured, implicit meaning. | You can follow a fast, interrupting Brazilian panel discussion. |
| C2 | Anything, spoken or written, including reconstructing arguments from it. | The language stops being the thing you are paying attention to. |
How this check works
It is a yes/no vocabulary test, the method behind LexTALE and its Portuguese adaptation LextPT. You are shown a word and asked whether it is real. Mixed in are invented words that obey Portuguese spelling but mean nothing — they are the point. Saying yes to those is how the score measures, and then subtracts, the temptation to claim a word you half-recognise. Without them, confidence would score as vocabulary.
Which word comes next depends on how you have answered so far, so the check spends its time near the edge of what you know instead of on words that are obvious either way. One more stage is optional: thirty seconds of CEFR can-do statements to set a starting point. There are no Portuguese listening clips yet, so the words stage is the one that produces the number.
What it cannot tell you
Three things, said plainly because most free level tests do not say them.
- Not one letter. Vocabulary size accounts for something like 60–70% of the
variation in CEFR level — a lot for one short measure, and nowhere near all of it. The bands
are narrow, too: B2 covers roughly 3,250 to 3,750 words, a difference no three-minute test
can resolve. So the result is a range, and it stays a range.
And that 60–70% is the generous reading. Researchers who re-ran the original validation of this kind of test on 554 learners concluded that, whatever their first language or level, its reliability as a measure of overall proficiency "is under question". What they question is not the word test — that measures vocabulary well — but exactly the step from vocabulary to a CEFR letter. It seemed worth telling you that rather than quoting only the study that flatters the method. - Not your speaking. Nothing here asks you to say anything. Somebody who reads well and has never spoken will come out looking better than they will feel in the room, and the check has no way to notice.
- Not a certificate. The official Brazilian Portuguese qualification is Celpe-Bras, run by Brazil's INEP and the certificate Brazilian universities and professional bodies ask for. Nothing generated in a browser substitutes for it.
Where the words come from
The real items are content words from a Portuguese dictionary, ranked by how common they are in Brazilian subtitles. Items whose frequency differs sharply between Brazil and Portugal are dropped — so the items themselves are Portuguese common to both varieties, ranked by Brazilian usage. That is deliberate: it measures how much Portuguese you know rather than which Portuguese you learned. It also means a handful of everyday Brazilian words — esporte, bacana — are not in the bank at all. The invented words are generated from the spelling patterns of real ones and then checked against 1.6 million real word forms from both varieties, so none of them is a word you could reasonably be expected to accept.
Start the check →About three minutes. Stop after any stage.