He aprobado el DELE! (I passed the DELE exam!)

Just wanted to share a bit of good news. I just found out this morning that I passed the DELE exam at the C1 level! If you are unfamiliar with DELE (or Diplomas de Español como Lengua Extranjera), it's a certification given by the Instituto Cervantes with the goal of spreading the Spanish language around the world, and is recognized by the Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport of Spain.

I'm really excited that I passed. It was a hard test, and I had no expectations either way. What I was surprised by, though, were that my worst sections were in reading and writing (I thought my worst would be in speaking, but turned out to be my best section).

Just for the sake of completeness, I've shown my results below.

Basically, your exam score is broken out into two groups (group 1: reading+writing, group 2: speaking+listening). Each individual test is scored on a scale of 25. In order to get a score of Pass (or "Apto"), you need to get a combined score of 30/50 in each group. I got a 32.5 in group 1 and a 43.3 in group 2. So as you can see, my skills are definitely skewed.

My scores were as follows (in English):

• Written expression and interaction: 15/25 points. Barely passed.
• Reading comprehension: 17.5/25 points. Passed.
• Listening comprehension: 19.17/25 points. Comfortably passed.
• Oral expression and interaction: 24.13/25 points. Near perfect.

At some point I want to give an analysis of how I thought the exam went and compare it to my actual results. I also want to provide some helpful tips for DELE exam hopefuls!

Stay tuned.

First post

After years of trying, I decided to finally create a journal of sorts for the languages I want to learn. So before we get started, I thought I'd write a little about myself.

Who are you?
I'm a single guy in my late 20's who recently finished graduate school. I worked in business before graduate school, and studied science in college. I'm moving to Europe in a few weeks to start up my new job/life there, but I grew up a normal, boring kid from suburban Southern California.

What are you doing here?
I figured I'd use a blog to keep track of my progress and keep myself honest with what I've accomplished in learning languages. My goal is to learn 2-3 languages up to fluency, another 3-5 up to conversational level, and be familiar with many more!

Why are you trying to learn languages?
I was born to an ethnic family but never learned the language of my heritage. I had always thought of it as kind of a shame, and felt a tinge of guilt when I saw other ethnic Americans speaking their own language fluently. I loved learning Spanish in school and French in college. I realized recently that I can probably apply that passion to other languages too.

Growing up, I never traveled much, but in the last five years I went to dozens of countries. It was awesome, and I think that one of the best ways to enjoy the culture and integrate yourself in it is to learn the language. Local people definitely appreciate it for the most part, and it opens up your mind a lot more and helps you feel like less of an outsider (although this feeling doesn't entirely go away, more on that later).

Which languages?
I'd love to learn 5+ languages (mind you, not natively, but enough to read the news, watch TV, and discuss it competently with high school/college graduates). My current state of language proficiency is embarrassingly bad, but I'll post it below. Hopefully over the coming years it'll grow.

• English: Native
• Spanish: Proficient, some would say fluent (I just took the DELE C1 level. I get the results in a couple of weeks so I'll keep you posted). I understand maybe 80%-90% of normal TV shows and 50-60% of the news
• French: Basic. I was never officially tested on this, but let's call it A1

I'd like to get Spanish up to fluent/bilingual level (maybe a C2 in CEFR/DELE terms) as well as French up to maybe C1.

The languages I'd like to learn up to conversational level:

• Filipino/Tagalog
• Mandarin Chinese
• German

I'll definitely post when I get my DELE results, but probably before then.

Stay tuned.