How to prepare for the PEGP exam: a step-by-step study plan

Start by checking where you actually stand

Before locking in a schedule, it helps to know what you are dealing with. Open the categories page and the progress dashboard and see what already feels familiar and what does not: people who have lived in Greece for a while often know culture and history reasonably well from everyday life, while questions about state institutions can be a complete blank spot. You do not need to work through everything in strict order first. A quick pass through mixed practice, or even one full timed mock exam, is enough to see the question format and get a rough sense of your starting point. Whatever score comes out of that first pass does not mean anything on its own, it is just a baseline.

Progress on the site works on a simple rule: a question counts as mastered after three correct answers in a row, and a single wrong answer resets that streak back to zero. That means your streaks will reset constantly at the start, and that is expected. The rule exists to make a question keep coming back until the answer is automatic, not to keep score of how many times you got it wrong.

Stage 1: the writing section

The first block is the writing section: a hundred themes, from the safe online shopping theme to the unaccompanied minors theme, each with a reading text and comprehension questions, grammar and vocabulary tasks, and a short essay to write. It is the largest section by volume, so it makes sense to start here while you have the most time and energy ahead of you, and to spread it out rather than trying to get through it in one push.

The reading comprehension questions tend to use a handful of the same traps, and it helps to know them going in. Read the question itself carefully first: whether it is asking for the main idea, a specific detail, or the author's stance changes what you should be looking for. Then answer strictly from the text in front of you, not from outside knowledge, even when you are confident you already know the real answer. Watch for absolute words like always, never, or only in the answer options: if the text does not actually support that level of certainty, it is usually the trap. It also helps to keep the false option and the not stated in the text option clearly separate in your head, since one means the text directly contradicts the statement and the other means the information simply is not there either way, and to pay attention to the order events are described in and to words like rarely or possibly, which quietly flip the meaning of a statement.

The essay itself is shorter than it sounds: the exam asks for about 80 to 100 words, according to the official exam procedure guide, not a long essay. The essay examples section on this site gives model B1 and B2 answers for all hundred themes, from an email about falling for an online shopping scam to an email to a family hosting unaccompanied children. Use them as a reference for length and structure rather than something to memorize word for word. Writing a few short essays regularly, by hand or in the trainer, tends to help more than polishing one long text.

The writing exercises also have separate references for synonyms and antonyms, worth keeping open while you work through this section. They save time when a word is on the tip of your tongue but will not quite come to you.

Stage 2: speaking

Speaking covers twenty five picture themes with model Greek answers, including the cinema theme. The exam usually opens with a few personal questions, where you are from, when you moved to Greece, why you want citizenship, before showing you a picture to describe and comment on. Treat the model answers on the site as a structure to build your own answer around rather than a script to repeat verbatim: examiners are generally listening for a coherent, reasoned answer rather than a single short phrase.

Say your answers out loud rather than just reading them silently: speaking and silent reading draw on different skills, and the exam needs the former. It also helps to work out your personal answers in a couple of full sentences ahead of time, rather than leaving them to be improvised on the day.

Stage 3: listening

The listening exercises cover fifty themes, from the Aesop theme to the Maria Callas theme, each with one audio recording and ten questions. Try listening once without the transcript and answering as best you can, then open the transcript on the site to see what you missed. Transcripts are meant for reviewing mistakes, not as the main way to study a theme: there is no need to memorize the recording word for word, what matters is getting the answers right.

If some answers still feel uncertain after listening, say on the Saint Efstratios theme, the listening answer key is there for exactly that. Use it toward the end of this stage to clean up whatever is left, rather than reaching for it on the first pass.

Stage 4: the four knowledge subjects

The last block covers the four knowledge categories: geography (70 questions), culture (70), history (80), and political institutions (80). Many people who have gone through the exam start with culture, history, and institutions rather than geography, since those subjects tend to have clearer logical connections between questions, while geography leans more on memorizing place names, prefectures, and borders, which goes faster once you already have a study rhythm going. This is not a strict rule though. If geography comes more naturally to you, start there instead. What matters more than the exact order is working through one subject at a time rather than all four in parallel.

Inside each subject, a simple pattern works well: study a new batch of questions one day and immediately test yourself in practice mode, then the next day do a quick pass over yesterday's material before moving on to new questions. The Mistakes and Review modes are useful here specifically because they only resurface the questions you actually got wrong, so a review pass covers a small, relevant set instead of the whole subject again. Work through one subject fully, take a day or two off between subjects, and every so often dip back into a subject you already finished through Mistakes/Review so it does not fade.

For geography, it helps to keep the interactive map of Greece open next to the questions: seeing a name placed on an actual map tends to stick better than a bare list of prefectures. For history, looking at questions against the timeline gives you a sense of which era an event belongs to instead of memorizing dates in isolation. For culture, the reference cards are handy when a specific festival or monument does not come to mind right away, since you can look it up without paging back through the whole material.

The final stage: a full mock exam

Once you have been through all four blocks at least once, take the full timed mock exam on the site, under the same time constraints as the real thing. The point is not a perfect score, it is getting used to the pacing and format before exam day: how much time the thematic questions actually take, how much the reading text and essay eat into your time, and how to split your effort across the written, listening, and speaking parts.

In the last few days, it is usually better to avoid new material and instead work through everything still flagged in Mistakes/Review across every section. That tends to be a calmer and more productive use of the final stretch than trying to cram whatever got left behind earlier.

Adjusting the plan to your own pace

How long this plan takes depends on your starting level and how much time you can put in. Some people get through it in a couple of months, others spread the same material over half a year, and both work fine as long as the studying is regular rather than a few long marathon sessions every so often.

The order of sections is not fixed either. It starts with writing and the essay here because that is the largest chunk of material, and leaves the four knowledge subjects for last because a lot of that content is already familiar from everyday life in Greece. If writing comes easily to you and the knowledge subjects feel like unfamiliar territory instead, it is reasonable to swap the order around. Whatever order you pick, the pattern worth keeping is the same: one section in focus at a time, regular trips back through Mistakes/Review, and a full mock exam near the end rather than on day one.