DELE B2 in 2027: exam dates, format, pass marks and vocabulary
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- 0:00DELE B2 is the Spanish certificate that universities, Erasmus offices and many employers ask for.
- 0:08It is a demanding exam, and most people who fail it fail on one paper, not on Spanish.
- 0:15In five minutes you will know what the exam looks like, what it takes to pass, when it runs, and which words decide your grade.
- 0:23There are four papers, and together they take about three and a half hours, plus twenty minutes to prepare the speaking.
- 0:30Reading is seventy minutes: four tasks and thirty-six items, from a long text to a gapped one.
- 0:37Listening is forty minutes: five tasks and thirty items, conversations, an interview and a long talk.
- 0:46Writing is eighty minutes for two texts of one hundred fifty to one hundred eighty words each: a letter or e-mail from notes on an audio, then an article, a blog post or a review.
- 0:59Speaking is twenty minutes with the examiner, after twenty minutes alone with the tasks: you weigh up proposals, describe a photo and comment on survey data.
- 1:09Each paper is worth twenty-five points.
- 1:12The papers form two groups: reading with writing, and listening with speaking.
- 1:18You need at least thirty of fifty in each group, and sixty of one hundred overall.
- 1:23One more rule that catches people: a writing task with fewer than one hundred words scores zero, so count your words.
- 1:32The B2 runs several times a year, and in 2027 there are five sessions, from April to November.
- 1:40Registration opens months ahead and closes about seven weeks before each exam, so the deadline comes earlier than most people expect.
- 1:50For the first session in April that means registering by the tenth of February, and starting on the words about four months before the exam.
- 1:58In Spain the fee is two hundred and four euros at the last check; each country sets its own, for example two hundred thirty-five euros in Germany or six hundred eighty-five zloty in Poland.
- 2:11Results come online about two to three months after the exam, and the diploma never expires.
- 2:18There is no vocabulary paper.
- 2:21Vocabulary is tested everywhere, and in two different ways.
- 2:26Reading and listening reward breadth: public topics like work, education, health, housing, science, the environment, politics, the economy, culture and the media.
- 2:39Writing and speaking reward something narrower, and much easier to learn: the connectors that hold a text together, the fixed phrases each task expects, the language of data for the graph task, collocations, and the subjunctive by function.
- 2:55That second group is where the coherence and register marks come from, and it is where most candidates lose points they could have kept.
- 3:04Here are four cards from our kit, with the trap each one hides.
- 3:09A contrast connector.
- 3:19It needs punctuation on both sides: a semicolon or full stop before, a comma after.
- 3:27The opening of a formal letter.
- 3:32The preposition and the pronoun have to match the reader.
- 3:36The phrase examiners expect when you weigh up a proposal.
- 3:44It takes an infinitive, or a that-clause in the imperfect subjunctive.
- 3:49And one collocation.
- 3:54Spanish takes a decision; "making" one is an anglicism, and it costs points.
- 4:00How many words is that in total?
- 4:03Our DELE B2 kit holds three thousand seven hundred ninety cards: about three thousand topic words, plus the connectors, phrases, collocations and grammar from the last chapter.
- 4:16If you started from zero with four months to go, that would be thirty-seven new cards a day, about thirty minutes.
- 4:24Almost nobody starts from zero.
- 4:27The free check tells you how many of these words you already know, and the plan shrinks to the ones you do not.
- 4:34Check your DELE B2 words for free: the link is below.
- 4:39If the check shows gaps, the full kit has every card with audio, practice in the shape of the exam tasks, and a plan that ends before your exam date.
- 4:49Good luck with your exam.
A five-minute video guide to the DELE B2: the four papers and how long each takes, how the exam is marked and what it takes to pass, the 2027 session dates and registration deadlines, and the words that decide the writing and speaking grade.