What A1 to C2 actually mean, and what they deliberately do not

CEFR describes what you can do at six levels and publishes no study hours, on purpose. The hour figures attached to it come from one exam board, about its own exams. Knowing which is which fixes most confusion in this field.

Aug 8, 2026Kevin Fan

Every tool on this site asks you for a CEFR level rather than for "fluency", because fluency is not a level and a calculator that accepted it would be inventing the most important number in the answer.

So it is worth knowing what the six levels are, and — more usefully — what the framework refuses to say.

The six levels, in plain terms

The Council of Europe defines these through can-do statements. Compressed:

Level	What it looks like
A1	A handful of set phrases. Introduce yourself, order something, understand slow speech aimed at you.
A2	Simple everyday exchanges. Shopping, directions, describing your background in short sentences.
B1	Hold a conversation. Handle most travel situations, describe experiences, explain an opinion simply.
B2	Work and study in the language. Follow a complex discussion, argue a position, interact with native speakers without strain on either side.
C1	Professional working proficiency. Express yourself fluently and precisely, use the language flexibly for social, academic and professional purposes.
C2	Near-native command. Understand virtually everything, summarise from multiple sources, express fine shades of meaning.

Two of these matter more than the others.

B2 is what people mean by fluent. Conversation without visible effort, work in the language, films without subtitles, occasional errors that do not matter. If your target is unstated, this is almost certainly it.

B1 is where self-study starts failing. Below it you can memorise your way forward. Above it the task is producing novel sentences correctly, which is why the method penalty grows and why app-only study stops arriving.

What CEFR does not say

It publishes no study hours. Not for any level, in any language. This is deliberate and it is the same choice ACTFL makes for the US, and it is defensible: hours depend on the language, the learner and the method, and a framework describing attainment has no business implying a timeline.

So where do the hour figures come from?

From exam boards, about their own exams. Cambridge English publishes guided-learning-hour bands for its qualifications — roughly 180–200 cumulative to A2, 350–400 to B1, 500–600 to B2, 700–800 to C1, 1,000–1,200 to C2. Those are the source of essentially every "hours to CEFR level" figure in circulation, including the shape of the curve in our own model.

They are exam-preparation figures for English, published by a body with standing to publish them. They are not a CEFR pronouncement, and they are not about your language.

Two consequences worth carrying around

The levels are not evenly spaced. Look at the Cambridge bands: A2 at ~190 hours, B1 at ~375, B2 at ~550, C1 at ~750. Each level costs roughly as much as everything before it. The pleasant early progress is not a preview.

Our model's own level factors have the same shape — A1 at 13% of the full figure, B1 at 50%, B2 at 73%, C1 at 100% — normalised against the C1 band and checked to land inside Cambridge's published ranges. That check caught a real error once: the source URL we cited for it turned out to be a fabricated link that 404'd. The factors were fine; the citation was not, and it took a manual check to notice.

An exam level is not a CEFR level. Exams certify a syllabus. Where an exam board asserts its own CEFR alignment without an external study, that assertion is worth what it cost — the HSK case is the clearest example.

Using this

Pick a level before you pick anything else. It changes the size of the project by a factor of four between A2 and C1, and it is the input every honest estimate needs and most published ones quietly assume.

The calculator asks for it directly, and the methodology shows the factor applied at each level and where it came from.

Posts resting on the same evidence, picked by shared citations rather than by hand.

"Fluent" is not a level, and that is why the estimates disagree
FSI measures to ILR 3. CEFR describes what you can do. HSK claimed a mapping the CEFR bodies rejected. None of them define fluency, which is why two honest sources can differ by a factor of four.
The "34 hours equals a semester" claim, read carefully
The study reports a range of 26 to 49 hours, averaged to 34. The endpoint it measures is a placement-test score for entering second-semester Spanish. Both of those matter more than the headline.
What it means when a calculator tells you no
Most estimate tools always return a number, because a number looks like an answer. Ours returns "this method does not get there" — and that output is the most useful thing it produces.

Sources

Every figure above, and where it came from. A post that traces other people's unsourced numbers does not get to have any of its own.

Guided learning hours — Cambridge English
The shape of the curve between CEFR levels. Cambridge publishes cumulative hours per level (A2 180–200, B1 350–400, B2 500–600, C1 700–800, C2 1,000–1,200); our level factors are normalised against the C1 band and every one lands inside its published range.
Foreign Language Training — US Department of State, Foreign Service Institute
The class-hour bands every estimate on this site starts from, and the definition of the proficiency they lead to (ILR Speaking-3 / Reading-3).
ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines — American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages
The proficiency scale ASL is assessed on. Like CEFR and unlike FSI, it describes what a learner can do and deliberately makes no claim about how long getting there takes.