Every Georgian course, teacher and app sorts you by letters: A1, A2, B1. Nobody tells you what the letters actually feel like in Georgian. So here is the whole ladder, described in bakery runs and supra toasts instead of committee language.
The letters come from the CEFR, the European framework that most language education uses. Georgia has an official version for Georgian, published by the Ministry of Education, and it is genuinely useful. It is also written for examiners. This post is the learner translation. For reference, our Georgian courses cover roughly A0 to B1, the first four rungs below.
The short version
| Level | Your Georgian life | Rough study time |
|---|---|---|
| A0 | Tourist with გამარჯობა | Day one |
| A1 | Greetings, bakery, taxi | Weeks of daily study |
| A2 | Daily life works, past tense arrives | Months (~250 hours) |
| B1 | Real conversations, supra participation | A year or more (~300 more hours) |
| B2 | Native TV, arguments, humor | Multiple years |
| C1 | Near-native comfort | The long road |
Those hour figures come from the level-description literature for Georgian as a foreign language, and they assume actual study, not owning a textbook. More on the honest math below.
A0 and the alphabet myth
A0 is not an official CEFR level, but it is a real place. It is where you stand when Georgian is 33 unfamiliar letters and the word გამარჯობა is a sound you can say but not read.
The classic mistake at A0 is treating the alphabet like a semester project. It is 33 phonetic letters. One focused afternoon of reading words you already know gets you past recognition, and the fine-tuning happens automatically once you start listening and reading real Georgian. Anyone who spent two weeks drilling letterforms before allowing themselves to learn actual Georgian has paid a tax that does not exist.
If you cannot read Georgian yet, that is not a verdict on your ability. It is a Tuesday afternoon you have not spent yet.
A1: surviving in Georgian
A1 is survival Georgian, and survival in Georgia is warmer than the word suggests. You can greet people properly, order at the bakery, tell a taxi driver where you live, count your change, and deploy the two magic words, მადლობა and უკაცრავად, at the right moments.
An A1 speaker runs on roughly the first 300 words of the language and the present tense. Sentences are short and mostly correct by accident. Georgians respond to attempted Georgian with real delight, which is worth knowing on the days it feels slow.
What A1 cannot do yet: anything in the past. You live entirely in the present tense, which makes for surprisingly philosophical small talk.
A2: daily life works
A2 is where Georgian stops being a party trick and starts being a tool. You handle shops, pharmacies, marshrutka logistics and neighborly chit-chat without switching to English. You understand most of what is said to you directly and slowly.
Two big things arrive at A2. The first is the past tense, which finally lets you tell anyone what you did yesterday.
The second is Georgian’s famous case system making itself known, including the ergative (the -მა ending that appears on the do-er of many past-tense actions). Textbooks introduce it with a chart and a warning. In practice it stops feeling exotic after you have heard a few hundred correct past-tense sentences, which is an argument for getting your input volume up rather than memorizing the chart harder.
Vocabulary-wise, A2 territory is roughly the first 800 to 1,000 words. If you are curious how word frequency maps to real progress, we wrote about that in the 5,000 most common Georgian words.
B1: real conversations
B1 is the level most learners privately want. You hold real conversations about your life, your plans and your opinions. At a supra you follow the toasts, and you can raise a simple one yourself without rehearsing it under the table. Georgians stop switching to English for your benefit, which is both the reward and the exam.
Honest observation from living here: B1 is also the level most expats never reach, not because it is unreachable but because A2 is comfortable. Daily life works at A2. Getting past it takes deliberate input, hours of Georgian you mostly understand, rather than more years of the same taxi conversations. That is the whole argument of how to learn Georgian, so I will not repeat it here.
B2: native media opens up
B2 is where Georgian made for Georgians becomes usable. Television at natural speed, podcasts, arguments about football, jokes that land on time. You express nuance and you catch it.
B2 is also where the language’s subtler machinery becomes yours, like the evidential past, a verb form Georgians use for things they did not witness personally.
It is the kind of grammar you almost cannot study your way into. It settles in through volume, the same way you learned that certain English sentences sound wrong without knowing the rule they break.
C1 and where our test stops
C1 is near-native comfort: registers, idioms, wordplay, bureaucratic Georgian when life demands it. It is a level you earn through years of living in the language.
A note on honesty. Our test stops below here. It reports an open top band of B2+, meaning B2 or above, and does not try to tell you which. Two reasons. The first is that separating C1 from C2 lives in speaking and writing, which need human evaluation, so anyone promising to certify your C2 online deserves a raised eyebrow. The second is plainer and ours to own: our hardest questions are answered correctly about 92 percent of the time by the people who reach them, so above roughly B2 the test has run out of questions rather than earned the right to name a level. We would rather say that than print a number we cannot stand behind.
How long each level takes
The number that gets quoted everywhere is the US Foreign Service Institute’s estimate: Georgian is category 4, around 1,100 class hours. What rarely gets quoted is what that number measures, which is professional working proficiency, the level where you can negotiate a contract. It is not the price of a conversation.
The figures quoted in the Georgian level-description papers are friendlier and more useful: roughly 250 study hours to a solid A2, and around 300 more to B1. At 30 focused minutes a day, that puts a real conversational level a year or two away, not a decade. Slower than the app-store fantasy, faster than the FSI number scares people into believing. We dug into the timeline question properly in how long does Georgian take, and into the difficulty question in is Georgian hard.
The variable that moves the timeline most is not talent. It is whether your study produces hours of Georgian you can mostly understand, and whether you speak out loud from week one.
Which level are you?
Until recently the honest answer was: nobody could tell you. There was no free, serious, CEFR-aligned way to test your Georgian online. So we built one.
The Georgian level test takes about 8 minutes, adapts to your answers the way proper placement tests do, and covers vocabulary, grammar, reading and listening. You get a band from A0 to B2+ with a sub-level, a skill breakdown, a vocabulary-size estimate against the 5,000 most common words, and a concrete suggestion for what to do next. Free, no signup, and it does not test speaking or writing, which it also tells you rather than pretending otherwise.
It is built on the same official level descriptions this post draws from, the questions are curated from the same teacher-built materials our courses use and reviewed item by item, and the level boundaries sharpen monthly as real results come in. The full design is public on the methodology page if you like reading about how tests work.
What to do at your level
Whatever the test says, the next move matters more than the label.
A0 or A1: get the alphabet done in an afternoon, then build the speaking reflex daily. This is exactly what our audio course, Speak Georgian in 50 Days, was made for, and lesson one is free.
A2: your lever is input volume. Comprehensible listening in quantity, plus keeping the words you meet. This is the podcast course’s territory, and the 5,000-word deck picks up where your vocabulary currently fades.
B1 and up: native content, real conversations, and patience with the plateau. Our structured courses top out around here, and we say that rather than sell you a level you have outgrown.
The test ends with this same advice, tuned to your actual result. Eight minutes, and you will know which section of this post is about you.
Find your level. Then come back in three months and watch the letters move.
