The DELE gives you twenty minutes to prepare and none at all to choose the mood.

Each paper has its own demand — hypothesis, concession, comparison, or a slot you fill alone.

• Two minutes on a photograph

  The DELE B2 photograph task asks you to invent a situation: who these people are, what has just happened, what happens next. It is all hypothetical, so it leans hard on conditional and subjunctive, and the examiner then asks about it.

• Assessing a set of proposals

  You are handed several proposals on a topic and asked which you would pick and why. The examiner then argues the other side, which calls for concessive structures — aunque sea, por mucho que — rather than the list of reasons you rehearsed.

• Talking about survey figures

  The third B2 task gives you the results of a survey and asks what you make of them. You need the language of comparison and trend — la mayoría, frente a, mientras que — and an opinion you can hold when it is questioned.

• Five recordings, nobody there

  SIELE gives you five tasks and a countdown for each. Nothing you say is picked up, argued with or built on, so a sentence that collapses at its halfway point is yours alone to rebuild, out loud, on the recording.

• Your own words, used against you

  At DELE C1 and in the A-level research project you speak first and are questioned afterwards. The questions are built from your own words, so the vaguer the presentation, the harder the discussion that follows it becomes.

Mood, aspect and stamina are what a Spanish oral actually tests.

Afterwards you see the clause where the mood slipped, quoted back with the correction next to it. The ones you repeat become the exercise for the session after.

• Subjunctive after es importante que, quiero que, ojalá — produced as the que arrives, not bolted on once the clause has already gone out.
• Ser and estar with adjectives, where both are grammatical and the one you pick is the thing you have actually said.
• Preterite against imperfect across a whole narrative, not one verb at a time, because it is the pattern an examiner hears.
• Por and para in argument, purpose against cause, settled fast enough that the preposition does not hold up the clause behind it.
• Filling the whole slot without circling the same clause, since stopping early leaves less of your Spanish for anyone to assess.
• Final-syllable stress carrying the tense — hablo against habló, hable against hablé — still audible once you speed up.

We do not know your rater

Instituto Cervantes sets the DELE, ACTFL sets the OPI, and we set neither. A score from a practice session is a score from a practice session. Boards revise their criteria and publish them level by level, so check yours against the current version rather than against us. Where this earns its place is earlier: getting the decisions automatic while there is still time to change them.