What A1, A2 and B1 actually mean
Every course promises a level and almost nobody can say what one is. What you can do at each step of the European scale, how long each one takes, and why a level is only real when it is tested by what you can produce.
Where the letters come from
The Common European Framework of Reference, CEFR, is the scale behind the letters on every course, certificate and job advert. It was written by the Council of Europe in 2001, and its one idea is that a level describes what you can do with the language, not what you have studied. It has six steps: A1 and A2 for the basic user, B1 and B2 for the independent user, C1 and C2 for the proficient one.
The definitions are deliberately about tasks. That makes them useful, and it makes them easy to inflate, because a course can call anything A2 and nobody checks.
What each level is, in practice
A1. You can introduce yourself, ask and answer simple questions about where you live and what you do, and understand slow, careful speech directed at you. You get by in a shop or a café with short set phrases. Sentences are simple and present tense, and every one costs effort.
Jesi li ti Ana?
Are you Ana?
A2. You handle routine situations: directions, shopping, a doctor's appointment, plans for the weekend. You can describe your family, your job and your past in simple terms, and follow the gist of an everyday conversation between others. You have a past tense and a future, and the endings still take thought.
B1. You can deal with most situations that come up while travelling or living in the country. You follow the main points of clear speech on familiar topics, describe experiences and give reasons for opinions. You can hold a real conversation, with mistakes, without the other person having to slow down much. This is the level at which a language becomes usable for a life rather than a visit.
B2. You understand the main ideas of complex text and follow a native conversation, including on abstract or technical subjects in your field. You speak fluently enough that talking to natives is not a strain for either side. Mistakes are rarer and no longer cause misunderstanding.
C1 and C2. Flexible, effective use for social, academic and professional purposes; at C2, near-native command. Most learners do not need these and most courses do not reach them.
How long each one takes
Guided learning hours are the usual measure: hours spent in lessons or structured study, not counting the time you spend using the language outside them. Estimates from examination bodies cluster around the same figures: something like a hundred hours to reach A1, another hundred or so to A2, then the steps get longer, about two hundred more to B1 and a similar amount to B2. The levels are not evenly spaced; each takes roughly as long as everything before it.
The figures shift with the distance between the languages. A Russian speaker reaches a given level in Serbian much faster than an English speaker, because most of the grammar is already theirs. They are estimates, not promises, and they assume the hours are spent producing the language, not watching it.
Where a level goes wrong
A level is inflated whenever it is awarded for exposure rather than production. Finishing an A2 course means you have seen the A2 material. It does not mean you can do the A2 tasks, and the gap between the two is the whole reason so many people with a certificate cannot hold the conversation it certifies.
The test of a level is whether you can produce the language it describes, from scratch, without options on the screen: the sentences of that level, in the forms and tenses it requires, at speed. Recognition can be at B1 while production is still at A1, and it is production that decides whether you are understood.
How the course uses the levels
The course is built along the CEFR. Each level is a sequence of lessons, each lesson one rule with the words it needs, and the level appears on the course page the day its lessons are published, never before. What a level contains is exactly what you can read there: the rules, the words and the sentences the level teaches.
Passing through it is a matter of production. Every sentence of every lesson is one you write yourself, checked word by word, and every word, form and rule has a level of its own from 1 to 10 that only rises when you produce it correctly on the day it is due. So "I am at A2" does not mean you have opened the A2 lessons. It means the words and rules of A1 and A2 are yours, tested, at whatever level the ladder says they are, and you can look that up for each one.
Sentences
Write it in Serbian
You are not teachers, you are students.
negated 'to be' (plural you) + plural noun, then pronoun + 'to be' + plural noun
That is a slower way to earn a letter than most, and it is the only one where the letter means what the framework says it means.
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