Upper-intermediate Italian for professional and academic contexts, abstract arguments, and complex topics.
Roughly 2–3 years of study. CELI B2 / CILS B2.
B2 Italian opens up the full congiuntivo system (imperfetto: venisse, fosse; trapassato: fosse venuto), the condizionale (vorrei, sarebbe), and the periodo ipotetico (se avessi tempo, andrei). Vocabulary expands to around 4,000 words for politics, economics, environment, ethics, and abstract reasoning. You learn near-synonym distinctions: proporre vs suggerire, affermare vs sostenere, raggiungere vs ottenere.
If you can follow an Italian-language film without subtitles, read Corriere della Sera, and lead a meeting in Italian, you're around B2. Most learners reach B2 after 2–3 years. CELI 3 / CILS B2 is the minimum for most Italian universities.
At B2 the differentiator is the congiuntivo imperfetto and trapassato; they're used in spoken Italian, not just literature. Read Italian newspapers daily, even 15 minutes. Use spaced repetition for full conditional sentence pairs (se sapessi, te lo direi). Start watching Italian films across genres to build register awareness.