Turkish CEFR Levels from A1 to B1: What Each Level Means and What to Study

What is the CEFR, and what is it not?

The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) was published by the Council of Europe in 2001. It gives teachers, examiners and learners one scale for describing language ability. The scale has six levels in three bands: A1 and A2 for basic users, B1 and B2 for independent users, C1 and C2 for proficient users.

The framework is language-neutral. The same descriptors apply to Turkish, Spanish or Japanese, and they describe what a learner can do: order a meal, follow a conversation, write a complaint. They do not say which suffix belongs at A2, or how many words make B1. A textbook, an exam or an app that sorts Turkish grammar into CEFR levels is making its own decisions. Dilsever is one of them, and the numbers later in this post are ours.

In 2020 the Council of Europe published a Companion Volume. It keeps the six levels and adds descriptors below A1 and for mediation, which means passing meaning on between people or texts. It also rewrites the descriptors in gender-neutral wording and extends them to sign languages. Both publications are free to read and are listed as sources below.

What do the six CEFR levels mean?

The summaries below are ours, written to give a sense of each step. The official descriptors are longer and more careful, and the two publications cited at the end hold them in full.

A1 is survival Turkish. You can greet people, give your name and where you are from, count, ask a price and catch a short answer. Conversations work only when the other person slows down for you.

A2 is routine Turkish. You can run everyday errands, talk briefly about your family, your work and last weekend, and read a short notice or message. Exchanges stay short and on familiar ground.

B1 is the first independent level. You can get through a trip on your own, follow clear speech on subjects you know, tell a story in order and say why you hold an opinion.

At B2 you can hold your own in a discussion, argue for a view and follow longer talk and texts in your own field. At C1 you can study or work in Turkish and handle long, difficult texts. C2 is the top of the scale, where you choose your words for precision rather than only to be understood.

A1 in Turkish: sound rules, cases and one tense

A1 tasks are small, but in Turkish they need a lot of grammar. To say where you live you need the locative (İstanbul’da oturuyorum). To say where you are going you need the dative (eve gidiyorum), and to say where something starts you need the ablative (evden çıkıyorum). Each of those endings changes its vowel to match the word it joins, so vowel harmony comes before any of them. Göksel and Kerslake’s Turkish: A Comprehensive Grammar sets out both the endings and the harmony rules.

The rest of A1 Turkish starts with the copula endings that say who you are (öğrenciyim). Then come var and yok for what exists, and the question particle mI (Çay var mı?). It also covers the plural -lAr, possession (benim adım) and one verb tense, the present continuous -(I)yor. The order in which to learn these is the subject of our post The Turkish Grammar Path: What to Learn First, from Sound Rules to Reported Speech, so it is not repeated here.

In Dilsever, A1 is 29 grammar topics and 632 words in 14 packs. We chose the words by category first and frequency second. Ranked by frequency alone, colours and the days of the week fall far down the list, yet a beginner needs them in the first week.

A2 in Turkish: the verb grows

A2 tasks are about routine and time: what you did yesterday, what you will do tomorrow, what you have to do. Turkish meets them with new verb forms. The past in -DI gives geldim (I came), and the future in -(y)AcAk gives geleceğim (I will come). The aorist -Ar/-Ir gives gelirim (I come, as a habit).

Modality follows. -mAlI says what you should do (gitmeliyim), and -(y)Abil says what you can do (yapabilirim). The optative -(y)AlIm makes a suggestion for us: gidelim (let’s go), yapalım (let’s do it). The capital letters mark vowels that follow harmony, so gidelim takes e and yapalım takes a. In gidelim the t of git- also softens to d before the vowel, and after a vowel stem the buffer y appears: okuyalım (let’s read).

Comparison with daha and en, noun compounds (Türk kahvesi), the genitive (annemin evi) and converbs such as -(y)ArAk (gülerek, laughing) round out the level. In Dilsever, A2 is 29 grammar topics and 940 new words in 18 packs, on top of the 632 from A1.

B1 in Turkish: stance, and clauses inside clauses

B1 asks you to pass on what someone said, give reasons and talk about what might have been. Turkish does much of this with a few suffixes. The evidential -mIş marks what you heard or inferred rather than saw (gelmiş, apparently he came). The conditional -sA, often after the aorist, opens an if-clause (gelirsen, if you come). -sAydI talks about a past that did not happen (keşke gelseydim, I wish I had come).

The bigger change is that verbs turn into clauses. geldiğini söyledi (she said that she had come) uses -DIK with a possessive ending. gelmesini istiyorum (I want him to come) uses -mA. Dilsever’s B1 grammar spends much of its time on these two kinds of clause. B1 Turkish also uses clauses that describe a noun, such as dün okuduğum kitap (the book I read yesterday).

In Dilsever, B1 is 24 grammar topics and 1,360 new words in 23 packs. That brings the total from A1 to B1 to 2,932 words, and B2’s 1,442 words take it to 4,374.

Dilsever’s numbers, level by level

The CEFR sets no word counts and no grammar lists, so every figure in this table is Dilsever’s own. The words at each level are new words: the 940 at A2 come on top of the 632 at A1. Each level has one pack that holds all of its words, plus themed packs that split the same words by topic.

Translations that have not passed review are shown for reading but kept out of graded practice. Grammar runs from A1 to B2, with 21 B2 grammar topics, and the B2 vocabulary collection is complete, with 1,442 B2 words. B2 learners have a path with both. You can set your level as high as C2, but materials for C1 and C2 are not available yet.

Instant Decks sit outside these counts. You name any topic, pick a level, and get a ten-card deck with examples, generated when you ask for it.

Using the levels without being ruled by them

Treat a level as a list of tasks, not a list of forms. Suppose you can tell a friend in Turkish what you did last weekend and ask about theirs. That is A2 work, whether or not you have met every A2 suffix. If you get stuck on a task, the grammar it needs is usually the thing to study next.

If a university, an employer or an office asks for a level, check which exam they accept and what result they require. Dilsever does not issue certificates, and a level in the app is not an exam result.