An interesting topic came up during my last Spanish tutoring session where I took the opportunity to ask my native tutor what he thought of my level in the language. For context, I have been learning with mostly Lingq for 1 year and 2 months. And I have had 11 weeks of tutoring (all in Spanish) with 1 session per week.
My Lingq stats. Keep in mind that I’m not sure these matter so much at this point. I have fallen off a cliff with my consistency on using the app. More than half of what I do with the language is outside of Lingq now (Youtube, AI, Reading Physical Books, etc).
Hours Listening: 224
Words Reading: 1.72M
Known Words: 21,645
According to my tutor my listening is a High B2 and my speaking is either a High A2 or a Low B1. I was encouraged by his feedback. But it also got me thinking about my own self-assessments.
In the past I have been a little hard on myself regarding my level. But this is somewhat intentional due to me seeing people often ranking themselves higher than what they really are. I also have not gone too much by the descriptions of the CEFR due to the fact that…Honestly, they are confusing and vague. They are not helpful to me. I also know that people often argue their usefulness when referring to language levels practically.
However, I refer to them due to how commonly people use them as well as knowing that experienced people like Steve Kauffman sometimes label B2 as being the benchmark for fluency. These statements give me a goal and an idea of what to shoot for given I have never learned a language to fluency before. Something else I see a lot is content online labeled with a certain CEFR level. And I have spent a lot of time reviewing them for Spanish to get a “feel” for the difficulty of each level.
If I had to self-assess my level I would say I am Low B2 in my reading and listening comprehension. And my speaking would be perhaps Low A2? I might say this based on my general feeling of ability when handling content labeled at a certain level. I am very discouraged when thinking I am a certain level and then struggle to listen to something on that level. I suppose one question would be: To be say B1 for example, does that mean you mostly know all the grammar usually taught up until that point and would know something like 95% of the words in topics of interest to you? Because to me. If I want to say I am at a certain level I would hate to get into a situation where someone treats me as such and then I don’t measure up. If that makes any sense. I know people say, “B1 means you passed a B1 exam.” I understand that but I have no need or interest in taking a test and I want to view the levels practically.
My thinking is lower than what my tutor says. I wonder if I am too hard on myself or if he thinks more highly of my abilities than I really have. I know that later in the conversation I said something wrong and he corrected me. I then asked: “Isn’t that something you learn when A2?” His response was that its actually learned on A1 level…
So, that left me a little confused. How could I be High A2 - Low B1 in speaking if I sometimes make A1 mistakes? Generally speaking I know I understand a good bit when reading or listening. And I am trying to catch up with my speaking. It has been my active use of correct grammar which has been holding me up. But I know I have been improving a lot over the last 3 months.
In any case. This is my update.