CEFR A1 explained: what A1 speaking actually sounds like
By Maya Lindqvist, Language Learning Coach · Sep 2, 2026 · 12 min read
What CEFR A1 means
CEFR A1 is the first of the six CEFR levels, the one the framework calls Breakthrough and groups under Basic User. At A1 you can use familiar everyday expressions and very basic phrases, introduce yourself, and ask and answer simple questions about where you live and what you have, provided the other person speaks slowly and helps.
I coach beginners in five languages, and A1 is the level I see misjudged most often, in both directions. Learners who can read a menu call themselves A1 when they cannot yet say their own address out loud; learners who hold a slow, patient two-minute exchange call themselves complete beginners when they have already arrived. The framework, published by the Council of Europe in 2001 and extended in the 2020 Companion Volume, settles the argument with descriptors about what you can do, not what you know. The whole ladder is laid out in CEFR Levels Explained: A1 to C2 in Plain English; this page is the first rung only.
The word to notice in the official definition is ‘provided’. Every A1 interaction descriptor carries a condition: provided the other person speaks slowly, provided they are prepared to repeat, provided they help you formulate what you are trying to say. The production rows have no such clause because there is no partner to describe; alone, A1 is ‘simple mainly isolated phrases about people and places’. Interaction is where the level lives, and you hold it with a partner who is doing half the work. That is not a criticism. It is the definition.
The official A1 can-do descriptors
The Council of Europe publishes a self-assessment grid with a short can-do statement per skill per level. These are the A1 rows, quoted or lightly shortened, with what each one means when you are the person speaking.
• Spoken interaction: ‘I can interact in a simple way provided the other person is prepared to repeat or rephrase things at a slower rate of speech and help me formulate what I’m trying to say. I can ask and answer simple questions in areas of immediate need or on very familiar topics.’ In plain words, you can have a conversation with a helpful person and not with an impatient one.
• Spoken production: ‘I can use simple phrases and sentences to describe where I live and people I know.’ A few sentences about your street, your flat and your family, one at a time, with pauses between them.
• Listening: ‘I can recognise familiar words and very basic phrases concerning myself, my family and immediate concrete surroundings when people speak slowly and clearly.’ Slow, clear, and about you. Change any of the three and the meaning goes.
• Reading: ‘I can understand familiar names, words and very simple sentences, for example on notices and posters or in catalogues.’ Signs, labels, prices, a timetable.
• Writing: ‘I can write a short, simple postcard, for example sending holiday greetings’, and, paraphrased, a form with your name, nationality and address on it.
What A1 speaking actually sounds like
The framework’s Table 3, written for assessors, describes spoken language at each level under five headings; the 2020 edition adds phonology as a sixth. The A1 row is brief. Range is ‘a very basic repertoire of words and simple phrases related to personal details and particular concrete situations’. Accuracy is a few structures you control only inside phrases you have memorised. Fluency is ‘very short, isolated, mainly pre-packaged utterances, with much pausing’. Coherence is ideas joined with ‘and’ and ‘then’.
Here is what that sounds like. The exchanges below are written by me to illustrate the descriptors; they are not recordings of learners. First, an A1 speaker answering a slow, friendly question about herself: ‘I am Ana. I am from Porto. I live… in Lisbon now. I work in a hotel. My hotel is… big. I like my work. And… I like Lisbon.’ Isolated phrases, one memorised unit at a time, a pause wherever she has to search, and a single ‘and’ doing all the linking.
Now the ‘provided’ clause, heard from the outside. The partner asks, at normal speed, ‘And what do you do at the hotel?’ ‘Sorry?’ ‘Your job. At the hotel. What?’ ‘Ah. Reception. I work… reception.’ The question had to be slowed down and cut into pieces before it landed, and the answer is a noun with its preposition missing, which is normal at A1. That is what the interaction cell means by communication ‘totally dependent on repetition, rephrasing and repair’. It counts. It is A1 working as designed.
Now the level above, the same person a year later, A2: ‘I move… I moved to Lisbon two years ago because my sister live here. I work in hotel, at reception, so I speak with tourists every day, but… only rooms, breakfast.’ The A2 version has a past tense, a reason introduced by ‘because’, and two ideas joined by ‘so’ and ‘but’. It also carries the marks the framework expects at A2: a tense that starts wrong and gets repaired, a missing third-person -s, a dropped article, a pause mid-clause. The A1 version is mostly isolated phrases learnt as units, with the odd new combination, held together by pauses and the partner’s patience.
Pronunciation at A1 has its own descriptor. The 2001 text: ‘Pronunciation of a very limited repertoire of learnt words and phrases can be understood with some effort by native speakers used to dealing with speakers of his/her language group.’ The 2020 Companion Volume rewrote that scale around intelligibility and dropped the native speakers, but the meaning at A1 holds: listeners used to your language group’s accent understand you with effort. Strangers on the phone are not those listeners yet.
Pre-A1, early A1 and A1 for young learners
Three phrases turn up in searches around this level and only one of them is official. Pre-A1 is real: the 2020 Companion Volume defines it as a milestone halfway towards A1, a band where the learner ‘has not yet acquired a generative capacity, but relies upon a repertoire of words and formulaic expressions’. Generative capacity is the whole point. At Pre-A1 you can say hello, thank you and a number; at A1 the first sentences you have never heard start to show through the memorised ones.
Early A1 is not a Council of Europe band. The framework itself allows sub-levels such as A1.1 and A1.2, which it calls a branching approach; schools use them for placement, and France even certifies A1.1 with the DILF. But ‘early A1’ on its own is not a level any examiner reports. For children, Cambridge runs Pre A1 Starters, A1 Movers and A2 Flyers, each tied to a level, which is the closest thing to an official young-learner ladder.
Typical A1 mistakes, and which ones are normal
Read the accuracy descriptor again: limited control of a few structures in a memorised repertoire. Errors are not a sign that you are below A1. Errors of a particular kind are what A1 is. These are the ones I hear every week, every one of them normal at this level, with a note at the end on which to fix first.
• Dropping the verb ‘be’ and the articles: ‘I student’, ‘she teacher’. The meaning survives, so the brain skips the word.
• Unmarked third person: ‘she go’, ‘he work’. A rule you know and cannot yet apply while speaking.
• Questions made by intonation alone: ‘You have car?’ Perfectly understandable to a helpful listener.
• No past tense: ‘Yesterday I go to the market.’ The time word carries the tense, which is exactly how A1 gets by.
• Word order borrowed from your first language, especially with adjectives and negatives.
• Fix first: the errors that block meaning rather than mark level, which means negatives that come out as positives, yes and no confused, numbers and times. A wrong article never sent anyone to the wrong platform. A wrong number has.
What A1 cannot do
A1 is a real achievement and a real ceiling, and I would rather you heard the ceiling from me than from a ticket inspector. At A1 you cannot hold a conversation with a stranger who is not helping you. You cannot handle a turn you did not expect: the shop is closed, the train is cancelled, the form has a question you do not recognise. You cannot describe what happened yesterday in connected sentences, and you cannot use the telephone with any comfort, because the phone takes away the face, the gestures and the patience.
A1 is enough to buy a ticket. It is not enough to explain that the machine ate your card. If that sentence describes you, you are not failing; you are A1.
How A1 is tested and certified
For English, Cambridge does not sell a separate A1 exam for adults. A candidate who sits A2 Key and scores 100 to 119 on the Cambridge English Scale receives a certificate stating A1; 120 to 139 is A2, and 140 to 150 is reported as B1. The Key speaking test lasts eight to ten minutes per pair of candidates, in two parts, with two examiners: one runs the conversation and gives an overall mark, the other only listens and marks the detail. For German, the Goethe-Zertifikat A1: Start Deutsch 1 certifies the level (that is the adult exam; young learners sit Fit in Deutsch 1); for French, DELF A1 does.
Academic IELTS and TOEFL iBT are admission tests whose reported scales start above A1, so an A1 learner has no reason to sit them. The exception is IELTS Life Skills A1, a short speaking-and-listening test built for UK visa applications, which is where A1 matters officially: the family visa asks for A1 on an approved test at the initial application, A2 in speaking and listening at the extension, and B1 at settlement. Trinity’s GESE Grade 2 and the A1 tests from LanguageCert and Pearson sit on the same approved list. Check the current rule on gov.uk before you rely on it; English-language requirements across UK routes have been under revision since 2025.
The hours from A1 to A2
The only figures worth trusting come from the bodies that teach or examine to the level, and they count guided learning hours: time under a teacher’s guidance, with self-study on top, not time spent in the language. Cambridge English estimates roughly 90 to 100 guided hours to reach A1 and roughly 180 to 200 to reach A2, so the step is another 90 to 100 hours, the shortest on the ladder. The Alliance française gives 60 to 100 hours for French A1 and 160 to 200 for A2. The Goethe-Institut says A1 in German takes 80 to 200 teaching units of 45 minutes, which is 60 to 150 clock hours, with A2 at 150 to 260. No board I know of publishes an equivalent table for Spanish, Italian or Portuguese, and I will not invent one. Treat every one of these as a range with error bars, not a promise; the arithmetic behind all of them is in How Long Does It Take to Learn English? The Honest Math.
Now the sum that matters. Say you spend those 100 guided hours in a class of twelve. If the teacher gives half of every lesson to speaking and shares it fairly, each of you speaks for two and a half minutes an hour. One hundred hours buys you four hours of speaking. That is why two people can sit the same course and one of them can talk while the other can only read. Hours in a room are not hours with your mouth open, and the A1 to A2 step is almost entirely a mouth-open step.
A daily speaking routine for A1
Twenty to thirty minutes a day, most of it out loud. Five minutes of shadowing a slow, short clip you understand completely; the free shadowing tool on this site has A2 passages you can slow down, and at A1 you should. Then ten to fifteen minutes of actual conversation on one topic, rotated through the personal, concrete ground the A1 descriptors cover: yourself, your family, your home, your routine, food, shopping, directions. Answer, then add one more sentence, then ask one question back. Finish with five minutes on the three words you reached for and did not have.
The partner is the hard part, because the descriptor demands one who repeats, rephrases and slows down, and few humans manage that every day. An AI coach repeats and rephrases as often as you ask, without sighing; Lucida is one, and I say that knowing whose blog this is, so discount it as you see fit. A patient friend on a video call works too. What does not work is silence, and at A1 silence is the default.
Record yourself once a month, two minutes, same prompt: describe your morning. Do not listen for fluency. Listen for whether the pauses are shorter and whether a ‘because’ has appeared. That is the sound of A2 arriving, and what to do once it has, including why so many people stop there, is in CEFR A2 Level Explained: What A2 Sounds Like, and the Way Out.
Frequently asked questions
Is A1 enough to travel?
For transactions, yes: tickets, rooms, menus, directions, all with someone willing to repeat. For anything unexpected, no. The descriptor says communication is ‘totally dependent on repetition, rephrasing and repair’, and unexpected moments on a trip rarely arrive with that person attached.
How long does A1 take from zero?
The boards and teaching bodies put it at roughly 60 to 150 guided hours depending on the language and the learner: Cambridge estimates 90 to 100 for English, the Alliance française 60 to 100 for French, the Goethe-Institut 60 to 150 clock hours for German. In my experience daily speaking, not extra reading, is what shortens the calendar.
Is A1 the same as beginner?
In everyday use, yes. In the framework, a true beginner is Pre-A1, someone with a stock of memorised words and phrases but no ability yet to build new sentences. A1 is the first level with what the Companion Volume calls generative capacity: still mostly memorised phrases, but with the first sentences you have never heard showing through.
What is the difference between A1 and A2?
A2 adds connected sentences, a past tense, reasons introduced by ‘because’, and the ability to handle very short social exchanges, though the descriptor is blunt that an A2 speaker still ‘can’t usually understand enough to keep the conversation going’ alone. A1 speaks mostly in memorised phrases linked by ‘and’ and ‘then’. Listen for a ‘because’ and a ‘yesterday’; when both appear reliably, you are leaving A1.
Can I get a certificate at A1?
Yes. Cambridge issues an A1 certificate to candidates who score 100 to 119 on A2 Key; the Goethe-Zertifikat A1 and DELF A1 certify German and French. For UK visa purposes, IELTS Life Skills A1 and the other Home Office-approved tests certify the A1 the family route asks for at the initial application.
What should I practise first at A1?
Speaking about yourself, every day, out loud. The A1 descriptors are all about personal details and concrete situations, so drill the topics you will actually be asked: name, home, work, family, routine, food. Learn phrases as whole units and say them until they come out without a pause.
Get the patient partner A1 depends on
Lucida is an AI speaking coach app for iOS and Android: you hold real spoken conversations with an AI coach, Lucy, and get real-time feedback on pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary, fluency, pace and filler words. It adapts to your level, goals and interests, which is the kind of partner the A1 descriptor assumes. Free to download on iOS and Android; some features require a subscription.
