Cavesa wrote:
Congratulations! You are awesome!
A few questions from someone still far from C2 Spanish, but with experience with the French equivalent DALF C2:
When it comes to writing, were the preparatory books and courses doing a good job? I really struggled with the French ones, as I believe they weren't explaining the formal requirements well enough (formal writing in French is something really different than in English or Czech and just translated) and even a native tutor was far from a perfect solution despite being definitely helpful. Fitting within a genre and guessing how much I was supposed to deviate from the original texts and what was too much (like in that czech fairy tale "běda tobě, Jiříku, jestli nedoleješ nebo přeleješ") was very hard. Had the Spanish preparatory sources given you all such information?
Would you have any tips of resources on writing in Spanish?
Was there anything surprising in the exam?
Did you find the time sufficient for the tasks? The last third of my exam writing really suffered due to the time running seemingly too fast. Did you find the writing time for DELE comfortable or was it a lot of pressure?
Did you find Cronometro sufficient, as far as the amount of practice went, or would you recommend learners to get more than one book of such model exams?
Thanks!
Hmmm, what do you think?
Correct, it's exactly the same for Spanish. I've searched the Internet up and down and there's nothing like an absolutely reliable guide to the formats of writing production. Cronometro and Preparacion al DELE give you a certain idea. I think you can rely on them 100 % if speaking about formal letters but the rest... this is all up to you. You can encounter absolutely everything - a record from a meeting, a press release, an article... My native tutor struggled in the same way as I did. I was pretty well prepared for writing formal letters and articles and the press release that I had to write in the exam surprised me a lot. In the end, it's always possible to write it
somehow, I did my best but I would have appreciated more information about that.
Resources - I didn't use anything special. Besides Cronometro and Preparacion al DELE, I used Nuevo Prisma C2 because its workbook has a plenty of exercises centered on writing tasks. They require a bit easier and shorter things than in real C2 exam but for preparation purposes it's fine.
I've already told you about the surprise
I didn't expect the press release task at all.
Time - Altogether it's 2.5 hours. For me it was fine but after a lot of practice. I can remember that at the beginning it was hard for me to complete the tasks within the given time. Just before the exam I used to spend around 1 h 10 min on Task 1 and 30 - 40 mins on Task 2 and 3 (each
) The girl that sat the exam with me told me that she hadn't had enough time to finish the writing part but she also hadn't practiced finishing it within the time limit.
Resources - There's nothing more than Cronometro, Preparacion al DELE and Nuevo Prisma C2. Only the first two mentioned contain exam models and only Cronometro has the real ones. But it's enough. Nuevo Prisma C2 is full of exercises that are exam-like so it's a great tool to start with.
Good luck! I admire your dedication! Having already the C2 level in French... I really don't know if I could do that again in another language