The CEFR levels, in plain terms.
Spanish courses are measured on the Common European Framework, A1 through C2, and the official DELE exams are built on it. Here is what each level actually lets you do, what grammar it asks for, and roughly how long it takes. The hour ranges are the commonly cited guidelines and they assume study plus real contact with the language, not study alone.
Where this site sits. The 90 day course is built to take a complete beginner through A1 and into A2, which is the level the DELE A2 exam certifies. 36 of the 90 days are written so far. B1 and above are not written yet.
Introduce yourself, order food, ask where something is, give your phone number, and understand someone speaking slowly and clearly about familiar things.
A1 is the level where Spanish stops being a foreign noise and starts being a language you can use badly. You work in the present tense, you learn ser and estar, you meet the gender of nouns, and you get a few hundred words that cover the situations a first trip actually puts in front of you. The sentences are short and you will hesitate, and both of those are fine.
- The present tense of regular verbs and the dozen common irregulars
- ser against estar, and tener for age, hunger and cold
- Noun gender and the articles that follow it
- Numbers, time, days and dates
- Roughly 500 words
On this site: Days 1 to about 40 of the 90 day course, plus the verb tables, the vocabulary themes and the pronunciation page.
Handle routine exchanges, describe your background and your surroundings, talk about the past in simple terms, and get through a problem at a hotel or a station without switching to English.
A2 is where the past tense arrives, and with it the ability to tell somebody what happened rather than only what is happening. You start joining sentences together with porque, cuando and pero instead of stacking them, and you can ask for something in more than one way, which is what lets you recover when the first way is not understood.
- The preterite, and the beginnings of the imperfect
- Direct and indirect object pronouns
- Reflexive verbs and the daily routine
- por against para, the comparison most learners get wrong
- Roughly 1,200 words
On this site: Days 40 to 90, the full verb reference and the situation guides. This is the level the course is built to finish at, and it is what the DELE A2 exam certifies.
Deal with most situations that come up while travelling, describe experiences and plans, and give reasons for an opinion rather than just stating it.
B1 is the level people mean when they say they speak a language. You stop translating in your head most of the time, you can follow a conversation between two native speakers if they are not in a hurry, and you meet the subjunctive properly for the first time. It is also where progress feels slowest, because the gap between understanding a sentence and producing it is at its widest.
- The present subjunctive, and the situations that trigger it
- The future and the conditional
- Relative clauses, so sentences can carry more than one idea
- The difference between the preterite and the imperfect in a story
- Roughly 2,500 words
On this site: Not written yet. A B1 course is the next thing after the 90 days are finished.
Follow a technical discussion in your own field, argue a position, and speak at a pace where neither side is straining to keep up.
B2 is the level most universities and employers ask for. The grammar is largely behind you and the work moves to range: knowing three ways to say something and picking the one that fits the room. Register starts to matter, and so does the ability to be wrong gracefully in the middle of a sentence and carry on.
- The imperfect subjunctive and the conditional sentences it builds
- The passive, and the se constructions Spanish prefers instead
- Idiom, and the difference between formal and casual register
- Roughly 4,000 words
On this site: Not written yet.
Use Spanish flexibly for social, academic and professional purposes without obviously searching for words, and understand long texts with implicit meaning.
C1 is where the language becomes a tool rather than a subject. You can read a novel without a dictionary at your elbow, follow a film without subtitles, and write something that a native speaker would not have to reread. What separates C1 from B2 is mostly listening under pressure: fast speech, regional accents, several people at once.
- Subtle tense and mood choices, rather than correct ones
- Regional variation across Spain and Latin America
- Formal writing, and the connectors that hold it together
- Roughly 8,000 words
On this site: Not written yet.
Understand virtually everything heard or read, summarise it from several sources, and express yourself precisely in complex situations.
C2 is not native, and it is not meant to be. It is the level at which the language no longer limits what you can say, only what you happen to know about the subject. Very few learners take the exam, and almost nobody needs it: the gap between C1 and C2 is professional polish rather than communication.
- Register and tone as deliberate choices
- Humour, irony and wordplay
- Literary and historical usage
- Vocabulary that is no longer countable
On this site: Not written yet.
Nobody in a market in Oaxaca will ask what level you are. The framework is useful for choosing material and for booking an exam, and useless as a measure of whether you can hold a conversation. If you track one thing, track how many days in a row you turned up.