A2 in one sentence
At A2 you can understand sentences and frequently used expressions about the things closest to you — family, shopping, local geography, work — communicate in simple routine exchanges of information on familiar matters, and describe your background and immediate environment in simple terms.
The recurring word in that description is routine, and it is doing something specific. A2 competence is organised around situations rather than around language: the pharmacy, the ticket office, the introduction at work. Inside a situation you have met, you are surprisingly capable. Outside one, you are back at A1.
This is why A2 feels so uneven from the inside. A learner who ordered dinner confidently on Monday and could not explain a delivery problem on Tuesday has not got worse — they have stepped out of the situations their English is currently built around, and the language underneath has not yet generalised.
Four things A2 makes possible
These are ordinary, unglamorous tasks, and that is exactly the point of A2: it is the level at which English starts handling errands rather than introductions.
Describe a symptom at a pharmacy
You say what hurts, since when, and whether you are taking anything else — and you understand the answer about how many, how often, and after food. This exchange defeats A1 completely, because it needs a past reference and a quantity in the same breath.
Rearrange something by message
A delivery, an appointment, a shift. You give a date, a reason and an alternative, in writing, where you have time to assemble the sentence. A2 written English is reliably better than A2 spoken English for exactly this reason.
Tell a colleague what happened yesterday
The past simple arriving at A2 is the single biggest functional jump in the basic levels. Narrating is not decoration — it is how you explain a mistake, report a problem, or account for yourself, and none of it is available before this level.
Compare two things and choose
Cheaper, faster, better, too small, not big enough. Comparison is what turns "I want" into a decision you can justify, and it is why shopping, booking and planning all become possible together at A2 rather than one at a time.
And the thing that still breaks: speed and unfamiliarity, together. A native speaker talking normally about a subject you did not expect will lose you within a sentence, and no amount of A2 vocabulary prevents that. Fixing it is the work of B1.
How long A2 takes to reach
Cambridge English puts A2 at roughly 180–200 guided learning hours from a standing start. This is the first level for which a published figure exists at all, which makes it the anchor for everything above it on this page.
Read it as a floor rather than a forecast. It assumes structured, directed study — a course, a syllabus, a teacher deciding what comes next — and it assumes that study is not competing with a full-time job for attention. Learners working alone from free material usually pass through more calendar time and, honestly, more total hours, because a good deal of self-directed study is spent re-learning things a syllabus would have sequenced properly.
The compensating factor at A2 is that it is the last level where exposure outside study time does relatively little. From B1 upwards, what you read and listen to for pleasure starts contributing seriously to the total. Here, deliberate practice is most of it.
Source: Cambridge English, Guided learning hours. Ranges are quoted as published; any step between two levels on this page is stated as a span because it is arithmetic on two ranges, not a figure anyone publishes.
What A2 grammar adds
A2 is where English acquires time. Nearly everything on this list is either a way of placing an event relative to now, or a way of qualifying it — how much, how often, how obliged, how likely. The present perfect in particular is the structure learners most often carry an error through from here to C1 if they meet it badly.
The named structures above are Present Perfect Tense, Comparative Adjectives, The First Conditional and Obligation: Must, Have To and Mustn't. In total this site publishes 31 A2 grammar lessons:
- Adverbs of Frequency
- Irregular Verbs
- Past Continuous vs Past Simple
- Subject and Object Pronouns
- Subject & Object Questions
- Possessive Adjectives and Pronouns
- Reflexive Pronouns
- Comparative Adjectives
- Articles
- In, On and At
- Superlative Adjectives
- -ed & -ing Adjectives
- Going To
- Will and Won't
- Present Perfect Tense
- Just, Already and Yet
- For and Since
- Present Perfect vs Past Simple
- Much, Many and A Lot Of
- A Little, A Few, Too and Enough
- Something, Anything, Nothing
- Ability: Can, Could and Be Able To
- Obligation: Must, Have To and Mustn't
- Advice: Should and Shouldn't
- The Passive Voice
- Relative Clauses
- Question Tags
- The Zero Conditional
- The First Conditional
- A2 Core Verbs
- Conversation Patterns
This is the longest single-level grammar list on the site, and that is faithful to the level rather than an accident of authoring: A2 is where the machinery gets installed. B1 uses it; A2 fits it.
The full index, in teaching order, is on the A2 grammar hub.
A2 vocabulary: how many words
A2 vocabulary is usually put at roughly 1,000–1,500 words in total. Our A2 lists hold 600 words across 20 topics, including Health & Body, Shopping & Money and Feelings & Emotions, each with pronunciation, an example sentence and flashcards. Notice the shift in what the topics are about: A1 lists name things in a room, A2 lists name things that happen to you.
Browse all 20 of them on the A2 vocabulary hub.
A2 against the exams
A2 is the point at which international exams begin to register a result at all, and the first level with a Cambridge qualification written for it.
| CEFR level | IELTS band | TOEFL iBT (1–6) | TOEFL iBT (0–120) | Cambridge exam | Cambridge Scale | Duolingo |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| A1 · Beginner | not reported | 1 – 1.5 | 0 – 23 | A1 Movers (young learners) | 100 – 119 | 10 – 55 |
| A2 · Elementary | 3.0 – 4.0 | 2 – 2.5 | 24 – 43 | A2 Key | 120 – 139 | 10 – 55 |
| B1 · Intermediate | 4.0 – 5.0 | 3 – 3.5 | 44 – 71 | B1 Preliminary | 140 – 159 | 60 – 85 |
These alignments are approximate, and every organisation that publishes one says so. The CEFR describes what a learner can do; an exam score summarises how one person performed on one test on one day. The two do not convert, they correspond — bands overlap at the edges, different exams disagree by half a level, and an institution’s own published requirement always outranks any comparison chart, including this one.
- A2: The Duolingo English Test reports A1 and A2 together as a single band, so a score here does not distinguish the two.
Sitting an exam at A2 is defensible for one reason: an external deadline and a certificate are strong motivation at a level where progress is hard to feel. It is not usually required by anybody. If nothing external is asking for it, the money is better spent elsewhere.
The full chart, with all six levels and the reasoning behind each column, is on the CEFR to IELTS, TOEFL and Cambridge comparison page.
Are you A2 or still A1?
The dividing question is about the past, not about vocabulary size. Can you tell someone what happened, without preparing it first? If a short account of yesterday comes out — imperfectly, but it comes out — you are at A2. If you can only describe what is true now, you are at A1 with a large vocabulary.
The second dividing question is about repair. When an A2 learner is not understood, they try a different way of saying it. An A1 learner repeats the same sentence louder. That switch from repetition to reformulation is a genuine marker of the level.
- You handle familiar transactions confidently and unfamiliar ones badly.
- You use the past tense, with irregular verbs still going wrong under pressure.
- You can write a short message more accurately than you can say the same thing.
- You understand a slowed-down explanation, but not the first, natural-speed version of it.
What comes after A2
B1 is where the situational scaffolding comes down. The point of B1 is not a longer list of scenarios — it is language general enough to handle a scenario you have never rehearsed, which is why it is the level the framework calls "independent".
Practically, the bridge is built out of three things: the conditionals, reported speech, and enough listening at natural speed that unfamiliarity stops being the same thing as incomprehension.
Read what the next rung involves: B1 — Intermediate.
Coming from below? A1 — Beginner is the rung before this one.