If you are applying for Georgian citizenship through naturalization, there is an exam between you and the passport. Three subjects: Georgian language, history of Georgia, and fundamentals of law. It has a reputation for being scary, mostly because almost everything written about it in English is vague. The actual structure is the opposite of vague. Every question you can be asked is published in advance, and once you understand how the exam works, preparing for it becomes a very solvable problem.
We spent the last few weeks reading the entire official question bank while building a prep course for it. This post is what we learned: how the exam actually works, what is in each subject, and what passing realistically takes.
How the exam actually works
The exam is administered by the Public Service Development Agency, the same agency that handles the citizenship application itself. The format:
- Three subjects: Georgian language, history of Georgia, fundamentals of law.
- 10 questions per subject, drawn randomly from that subject’s official bank.
- Pass mark: 7 of 10 in every subject. A brilliant history score does not rescue a weak law score.
- 20 minutes per section. Enough time if you can read Georgian at a steady pace, tight if you are decoding letter by letter.
- Everything is in Georgian. Questions, answer options, all of it. There is no English version.
- Multiple choice. Four options per question, one correct.
The first attempt is free. Fail a section and you retake just that section at 40 GEL per try. A passed result stays valid for one year, which is the window for your application to move through the process.
A few narrow categories of applicants are exempt from parts of the exam. The rules for those are on sda.gov.ge, and if you think you qualify, check the official source rather than a blog post.
The part that changes everything: the questions are public
The Public Service Development Agency publishes the complete question bank on its website. 200 questions for language, 200 for history, 200 for law. 600 in total. The 30 questions you face on exam day are drawn from those 600, word for word.
Read that again if you are stressed about this exam. There are no mystery questions. No examiner improvising. The whole exam is an open book that most people never open, because the book is in Georgian.
That is the real difficulty of the Georgian citizenship exam. Not the history, not the law. The reading. The material itself is what a motivated person can learn in weeks. But you have to learn it through Georgian text, and you have to read fast enough to get through 10 questions in 20 minutes, three times.
What is actually in the three subjects
Georgian language tests reading comprehension and basic grammar. Many questions give you a short text or a sentence with a gap and ask what belongs in it. If you have been living in Georgia and speaking survival Georgian, this section rewards you for finally sitting down with the written language.
History of Georgia runs from prehistory to the modern day. Ancient kingdoms, the golden age, the long stretch of empires, independence. Some of it is genuinely great material. The very first question in the official bank asks where Homo georgicus was discovered, and the answer, Dmanisi, is the site of the oldest human remains found outside Africa. Georgia opens its citizenship exam by pointing out that people have lived here for 1.8 million years.
Fundamentals of law covers how the state works: the constitution, courts, rights, and the practical rules of civic life. It is the section people expect to hate and then find surprisingly manageable, because the questions test recognition of core facts, not legal reasoning.
Two real questions from the bank
These are verbatim from the official bank, with our translations.
History:
საქართველოს ტერიტორიაზე სად აღმოაჩინეს ჰომო გეორგიკუსი?
Where on the territory of Georgia was Homo georgicus discovered?
ა) შულავერში (In Shulaveri) · ბ) დმანისში (In Dmanisi) · გ) თრიალეთში (In Trialeti) · დ) ბოლნისში (In Bolnisi)
Answer: ბ, in Dmanisi.
Law:
როგორ ხორციელდება სამართალწარმოება საქართველოში, თუ პირმა არ იცის სახელმწიფო ენა?
How are legal proceedings conducted in Georgia if a person does not know the state language?
Answer: ა, a person who does not know the state language is assigned an interpreter.
Notice what these have in common. They are concrete facts, answerable by anyone who has studied the bank. Multiply by 600 and you have the whole exam.
What passing realistically takes
Two things, and only two things.
First, you need to know the material in the bank. Not Georgian history in general. The 600 questions. Studying anything broader is admirable and unnecessary.
Second, you need to read Georgian at exam pace. This is the part most people underestimate. If the Georgian alphabet still slows you down, fix that first, it takes an afternoon to learn and the exam is unforgiving about speed. From there, the exam’s own vocabulary is a closed set. The same words for kingdom, constitution, court, and century come up again and again across the bank. Georgian is a hard language in general, but this exam does not test Georgian in general.
How we built the prep course
When we looked for a structured way to prepare for this exam in English, we could not find one. The official bank is a set of documents on a government website, in Georgian, with no translations and no way to practice. So we built the course we thought should exist.
Georgian Citizenship Exam Prep covers all 600 official questions across 33 lessons. Every question appears exactly as it does in the bank, with an English translation, an explanation of why the answer is right, and the vocabulary you need to read it. You practice questions from the first minute rather than sitting through lectures, because the fastest way to learn an exam is to take it, in small pieces, with the answers explained.
Two things in it earn their keep:
- The mock exam. 10 random questions per subject, 20 minutes on the clock, Georgian only, scored 7 of 10, exactly like the real thing. When your last three mock runs are green, you book the real exam with actual evidence you are ready, not a feeling.
- Flashcard drills that mirror the exam. Each lesson’s questions become multiple choice flashcards with the official answer options, spaced over time so they stay learned. No fill-in-the-blank games, the exam is multiple choice, so the drilling is too.
The course is $49.95, one payment, yours forever. The first 3 lessons are free, which is enough to work through real bank questions and see whether the method fits how you learn. If you are earlier in your Georgian journey, our guide to learning Georgian is the better starting point, and the citizenship course will still be here when the application paperwork starts.
The people who fail this exam mostly fail it the same way: they show up having skimmed a translated summary instead of having drilled the bank. Do not be that applicant. The questions are sitting there, published, waiting to be learned. 600 of them, and then a passport application with one fewer obstacle in it.
