My 8-week DELE study schedule (free resources only)

This is gold. Saving and sharing with my study group. The "stop studying 24 hours before" advice is underrated — I bombed an exam once because I crammed until midnight and couldn't think straight in the morning.

What do you think about condensing this to 4-5 weeks if I can do 2-3 hours per day? I have a test date that's sooner than I'd like and trying to figure out if I can make it work.

The Anki flashcard tip is something more people need to hear. I have a DELE deck with about 200 cards covering all the key terms and formulas. Doing 20 cards/day during my lunch break added up faster than I expected.

Great breakdown. One thing I'd add to Week 1: look at the score breakdown from your baseline practice test — not just the overall score. Most DELE exams are weighted by domain, and knowing which domains carry more weight changes how you allocate study time.

Honestly I almost quit around week 3. I'd done the foundation stuff, read through the official content outline, and I still felt like I knew nothing. It wasn't clicking. I kept thinking I'd wasted money signing up and that people who pass these things just have some natural language brain that I don't have. But I kept going mostly out of stubbornness, an hour a day, sometimes less when the kids were a nightmare.

And here's the thing nobody tells you. The progress is invisible until suddenly it isn't. Somewhere around week 6 the listening sections stopped sounding like noise and I could actually follow them. I'm not saying the free resources are magic, you've gotta show up daily and it's boring a lot of the time. But if you're sitting there at week 3 feeling like a fraud, that's normal, don't read into it. I scraped a pass and I genuinely didn't think I would. Stick with the schedule.

Quick update since I last posted this schedule. I took a full timed practice test this past weekend and scored 78% on the reading section, which is way up from the low 50s I was getting back in week 3. Honestly the biggest jump came once I stopped just reading articles and started doing actual exam-style questions every single day. I've been grinding through these free dele b1 and b2 reading comprehension sets on my lunch break and it's made a real difference. The format finally clicked for me.

I'm planning to sit the real exam in November. That gives me a couple more months to clean up my writing, which is still my weak spot. If you're following this schedule and feeling stuck around week 4, don't panic. I almost gave up there too. Just keep showing up for your hour a day and trust me, the practice scores start moving. They really do.