Passing DELE B1, Failing DELE B2
Two Years of Learning Spanish in Costa Rica
【Costa Rica Stories #16】

When I arrived in Costa Rica in October 2013, I could barely manage "Hola" and "Gracias." A little over a year on, at a DELE exam center in San José, I sat for the oral test of the DELE B1 and scored a perfect 25 out of 25. I can still hear the examiner laughing and saying "Muy bien."

So how did the B2 go, the one I sat for toward the end of my posting? It was a total wipeout. And here in 2026, ten years after I came home, my B2 rematch is still unfinished.

This is the story of my Spanish across the two years I spent as a JICA volunteer in San Vito, my post in southern Costa Rica.

A salsa class taught in English

Right after I arrived, JICA sent me through three weeks of intensive language training. The school was in San José; my classmates were mostly students from the US and Europe, and the lingua franca of the school was English. We were there to learn Spanish, and yet the breaks happened in English. As the one Asian kid in the building, I sat in the gap between two languages I couldn't hold.

One of the school's after-hours activities was a salsa-and-merengue class. The instructor was Costa Rican, the explanation came in English, and the music was the rhythm of the Spanish-speaking world — a layered confusion in which someone telling me "step right, then turn" couldn't keep my feet from chasing the Spanish-language beat. Funny now; deeply confusing at the time.

Still, by the end of the three-week course I could get through the closing presentation in Spanish — haltingly, but on my own. I no longer remember what I presented. What I do remember is the teachers listening, every one of them visibly surprised. Apparently they had all pegged me as someone who couldn't speak.

San Vito, and two teachers

After the training I was assigned to San Vito (Costa Rica Stories #3), a town near the Panama border. For two years there, English was nowhere. The supermarket, the clinic, the workplace — all Spanish. It became, in the most literal sense, a language for survival.

Once I'd settled into my post, I started private lessons. The first were in person, with a San Vito teacher named Elisa — but the days she couldn't make it kept piling up, and those lessons quietly faded out. What I turned to instead was an online Spanish school. That's where I met Leila, and the lessons that began on a screen would grow into a long relationship.

The lessons covered grammar, the subjunctive, the conditional, vocabulary, speaking practice. No set textbook; I would bring in compositions I had written at my post and conversations from work that had defeated me, and we would unwrap them together.

As the back-and-forth of compositions with Leila built up, I started to think, "Maybe I'll go take the DELE." From there she set me one DELE-prep assignment after another — a composition titled Mi visión del porvenir (My vision of the future) was one of them. Her method was less drill, more dialogue, and that human warmth is exactly what made Spanish settle into my body.

Out in the village where I went to do rehabilitation work with the Ngäbe community (Costa Rica Stories #4), everything with the clinic staff and patients' families happened in Spanish too. Less test prep, more daily conversation — and the words slowly took root.

DELE B1 — and a perfect oral

Once I'd found my feet in Costa Rican life, I decided to sit for DELE B1. In Costa Rica, DELE testing is run through accredited exam centers in and around San José, and from San Vito that's about six hours on a long-distance bus. It's far enough that I went up to San José the day before and stayed near the venue.

DELE B1 is a four-skill exam — reading, listening, writing, and speaking. With breaks it runs to several hours, and the fee was, for me back then, far from cheap (for reference, the base price in Spain is around €160 for B1; in Costa Rica you pay the local-currency equivalent — check the official site for the current year).

What I dreaded most was the oral. You sit across from an examiner and have to keep talking on a given topic for several minutes. I ended up telling stories about the people in the Ngäbe village and the dinner table of my host family (Costa Rica Stories #13), and before I knew it we were just having a conversation.

Weeks later the result arrived: oral expression, 25/25 — a perfect score. I yelled out loud, alone in my room. My grammar was never clean. What I think pushed me to the perfect score was the sum of every dinner with the host family, every offhand chat with co-workers, every back-and-forth with the woman at the market. Not the language I memorized for the test, but the language I spoke for the sake of getting through the day — that's what came back as the score.

The end of my posting: DELE B2, total wipeout

The perfect score on the B1 oral had left me with a strange confidence. "If I could talk like that, surely I can manage B2 too." Some time later, with the end of my posting in sight, I went to sit for B2. In hindsight, that confidence rested on very little.

The result, plainly: a wipeout.

Reading: the volume of long passages was on another level, and the clock ran out before I reached the final questions. Listening: speaker speed and vocabulary range were merciless, and my hand couldn't keep up with notes. Walking out of the room, I already knew — that one was a fail.

The gap between B1 and B2 on the CEFR was deeper than I'd imagined. Spanish picked up in daily life will push you to B1, but the abstract, argumentative register B2 demands is a different kind of training. Reading editorials, organizing a position, articulating for and against — nothing at the kitchen table prepares you for that.

Ten years on, the rematch is still pending

Even after I came home in September 2015, I kept up the online lessons with Leila for another year or two. But there's almost no occasion to use Spanish in Japan. Work pulled me in, other research subjects pulled me in, and I drifted away from the lessons too. Even when I returned to Costa Rica in 2025 for the first time in ten years (Costa Rica Stories #17), my tongue didn't move the way I expected.

What brought me back to Spanish was a change of jobs. Once I had reason to use the language at work, I returned to Leila's lessons. The same teacher as before, the same routine as before — write a composition, get it corrected, finish with small talk. What's different is the pace: I've stepped it up from the San Vito days, and these days I take about three lessons a week. Even so, growing your Spanish in a daily life that runs almost entirely in Japanese is, honestly, hard.

The B2 rematch is still unfinished. Ten years have passed since I let it slip. But this year — within 2026 — I intend to go back and actually pass it. The exam paper I couldn't reach the end of last time, I'll read this time all the way to the final question. That is, right now, my most concrete goal.

Before you start studying for the test, find someone you want to talk to in Spanish. The score arrives later, as a by-product of the relationship.

Spanish was a language of relationships

Looking back, across those two years in Costa Rica, Spanish was never an academic subject for an exam. It was the kitchen language of the host family, the small-talk language of my lessons with Leila, the greeting language I exchanged with kids in the Ngäbe village. The perfect B1 oral and the B2 wipeout are just two entries on a longer ledger.

If anyone reading this is about to start learning Spanish, what I'd say is one thing only. Before you start studying for the test, find someone you want to talk to in Spanish. The score arrives later, as a by-product of the relationship.