Ask somebody how their language is going and you'll get a hedge. "Getting there." "Not great." "I can read a bit."
Nobody has a number, because nobody has been given a unit worth using.
The unit most people reach for — A1, B2 — was standardised in 2001, and it does the job it was designed for: telling a university or an employer roughly what someone can handle. It was never meant to tell you what to learn next Tuesday. Coverage is the newer question, and it is the one you can act on.
The Units on Offer Are All Bad
Vocabulary count measures things you'd recognise on a page, which is a different act from producing them.
Hours studied measures effort, and effort has no fixed exchange rate with ability.
Levels measure your position against an institutional rubric built for comparing certificates, assessed largely on paper, with time to think.
Streaks measure attendance.
Every one of them can climb substantially while your ability to hold a conversation stays exactly where it was — which is a strange property for a progress measure to have.
A Unit That Answers the Actual Question
The question you care about is simple. If somebody speaks to me, how much of this can I handle?
So measure that. What proportion of ordinary conversation are you covered for?
It's a real number and it's computable, because the frequency distribution of everyday speech is known and steep. A relatively small set of high-frequency items accounts for a very large share of what actually gets said, so coverage climbs fast at the start and then slows. Which is honest, and no other metric tells you that.
What Coverage Does That a Level Can't
It's directional. It tells you what to learn next, because the next item is simply the next most frequent one you haven't got. No ambiguity about what would help most.
It's honest about diminishing returns. Going from 15% to 50% takes ten songs. Going from 85% to 95% takes the remaining fifty-three. A level structure hides that. Coverage shows it, so you can decide where you want to stop.
And it describes the conversation rather than you. It isn't a rating of your ability or your intelligence — it's how much ground is covered, which is a considerably less anxious thing to look at.
Something to Actually Say
Next time somebody asks, you can answer properly. Not "intermediate, I think." Something closer to: I can take part in about half of a normal conversation, and I know exactly what the next ten per cent costs.
That's somebody who knows where they are.
About Outputly
Outputly measures coverage. Seven songs: 15% of everyday conversation. Seventeen: 50%. Forty-seven: 85%. All 100: 95%. No levels, no bands, no certificates — just how much of the conversation you're covered for.