Doing the DELE exam can be difficult, but they’re definitely worth while, and to make these examinations as easy as possible for you, you need to prepare.

You can prepare in lots of ways; class, reading, watching movies, talking to people in real life, but one of the ways you’re probably going to want to practise is by using textbooks. Which is why we wanted to write our recommendations of the best textbooks for the DELE exam.

These are the textbooks we would recommend you use to prepare for the DELE exams. In this list we have broken our recommendations down by level and we have also recommended a textbook to learn grammar and then a different textbook to help you work through past papers. We hope this list is useful to you.

The two book recommendations we are giving you are for grammar and past papers. So if you don’t want to read our tips in between, you can just scroll down to these two headings.

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Practise Paper Textbooks

Why are practise papers important?

Practise papers are important because they give you a feel of what the actual DELE exam is going to be like.

You may be confident with your grammar, you may be able to watch television with subtitles or hold a conversation, but unless you practise the skills that are going to come up in the exams, you’re just not going to be prepared for the real thing.

How should I use these textbooks?

Don’t leave them until right before your exam. I would start trying past papers a few weeks or months before the actual exam. This way you give yourself the time that you need.
If you’re working and you can only fit in one a week then that’s fine, as long as you give yourself enough time before the actual exam. If you start two months before you could get through eight practise exams and you would be really prepared.
Do try and do the past papers under exam conditions. This means try and time yourself so you take as long as you would in the actual exam, and don’t look up words you don’t know in a dictionary while you’re doing the practise paper.
Once you’ve finished, by all means go back and check out the new vocabulary but don’t do it while you’re doing the practise, because the whole point is to get you used to exam conditions and if you don’t know a word in the actual exam, you won’t be able to look it up.
Instead, you’ll have to infer it’s meaning from what’s written in the rest of the text.

These are the best textbooks we would recommend for doing past papers.

What’s in these textbooks?

In these textbooks, you will find past papers for:

listening
writing
reading
speaking

Of course, with writing and speaking you won’t be able to do them alone.

But if you have a Spanish teacher, you can ask them to help you with the speaking sections or to take a look at your written work.

Each textbook should also contain a CD, but check the descriptions on the product before you buy.