Written partThis one is tough because it takes 5 hours to get it done, with one short break of 30 minutes in between. The difficulty corresponds more or less to what I expected, with absolutely no surprise in reading comprehension. The first text was about quantum computing. The second one (with some paragraphs extracted from the main text) was an article written by Gabriel Garcia Marquez about Julio Cortazar. The third task contained texts about son and danzon (Caribbean dances).
The listening comprehension was a bit more difficult. Apart from the fact that the recordings are played on a common computer using regular speakers, one of the recordings was extremely hard to understand because of the background noise and there was another one with music on the background (intentionally
)
Almost all of the recordings, except one, had Latin American accents. I'm used to European Spanish but it wasn't a big deal.
As for the written production, this was definitely the most demanding task. It tests the ability to process various inputs (texts, audio) and produce three texts. In my test, specifically, the following ones were required:
- newspaper article about sustainable tourism (400 - 450 words),
- press release about literary contest (150 - 250 words)
- article about after-school activities of the children (200 - 250 words).
That's a lot of output, lot of handwriting (legible!
) and a lot of stress. After all the previous parts, I was quite tired and personally I think that this was the most difficult part for all of us.
PreparationI used Preparacion al DELE C2 for acquiring the advanced vocabulary and get familiar with the exam format. In the last four months I used Cronometro C2 that focuses on the specific skills tested in the exam.
I also went through all the texts I wrote together with my tutor, which is something I really recommend. There's no need to practice the reading and listening comprehension with somebody, in my opinion, but have the texts checked and practice the oral output with a native tutor is extremely useful.
And now... let's wait for 2 months to get the results