How can I find out my Spain (Castilian) level for free?

Take a vocabulary-size check: you are shown real Spain (Castilian) words mixed with invented ones and asked which are real. It takes about three minutes, needs no signup, and estimates how many words you recognise, which maps roughly onto the CEFR levels A1 to C2. It is an estimate with a range, not a certificate — DELE, run by Instituto Cervantes; SIELE, from the same institutions, is the faster online alternative, awards the official one.

Can a short online test really tell me my CEFR level?

Not to a single letter, no. Vocabulary size explains roughly 60 to 70 per cent of the variation in CEFR level, and the CEFR bands are narrow — B2 spans about 3,250 to 3,750 words. A few minutes of answers can place you within a band or two and cannot do better than that. Any free test that hands you one confident letter is rounding away its own uncertainty.

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What is my Spain (Castilian) level?

Q: Does this test Spain’s Spanish or Latin American Spanish?

The words are common across Spanish varieties, and the frequency ranking comes from a subtitle corpus that mixes European and Latin American Spanish — so the check measures Spanish vocabulary, not specifically Spain’s. DELE and SIELE are accepted across varieties.

Three minutes of tapping gives you a range — how many Spain (Castilian) 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 195 invented ones in the bank.

What the levels mean, in Spain (Castilian)

CEFR is the Council of Europe's six-level scale, and it is what Spanish 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 Spanish.

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 RTVE news and follow it without subtitles.
C1	Extended speech even when it is not clearly structured, implicit meaning.	You can follow a fast, interrupting Spanish tertulia.
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 Spanish 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 Spanish 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 Spain (Castilian) qualification is DELE, run by Instituto Cervantes; SIELE, from the same institutions, is the faster online alternative. Nothing generated in a browser substitutes for it.

Where the words come from

The real items are content words from Wiktionary, tagged by part of speech and ranked by how common they are in a Spanish subtitle corpus. Unlike the Portuguese checks there is no two-variety fairness filter here, because only one Spanish frequency list of this kind exists — the corpus mixes European and Latin American Spanish, so the ranking reflects Spanish broadly rather than Spain specifically. The invented words are generated from the spelling patterns of real ones and then checked against 1.2 million real word forms, so none of them is a word you could reasonably be expected to accept.