CELGA 4 (Galician C1) common mistakes
CELGA 4 (Galician C1) · Understand the traps and how to avoid them.
Writing a formal letter or email using only 'ti' verb forms and possessive 'teu/túa', or mixing 'ti' and 'vostede' within the same text (e.g. 'Espero que recibas... Atentamente, Vde.').
Candidates transfer Spanish or English address conventions, and Galician informal address is phonetically and morphologically close to Spanish 'tú', so the register boundary is not felt as a real choice. Many also assume 'vostede' is archaic because it is less frequent in casual speech.
What to do instead
Build a fixed template for each register and drill it until automatic: formal letters use 'vostede/vostedes' + third-person verb ('Agradézolle', 'Quedo á súa disposición', 'Atentamente'), informal use 'ti' + second-person ('Agradézoche', 'Quedo ao teu dispor', 'Un saúdo'). Before writing, decide the register in one line at the top of the answer and check every verb ending and possessive against that decision.
Producing a written task that answers the prompt's topic but omits the required communicative functions, e.g. a complaint letter that complains but never requests a solution, or an opinion text that gives no counterargument or conclusion.
Candidates plan by topic ('write about housing') rather than by task requirements, and under time pressure they write what they can say rather than what the task demands. C1 tasks typically bundle two or three functions (describe + justify + request).
What to do instead
Underline the functional verbs in the prompt (describe, compare, argue, request, advise, hypothesise) and turn them into a checklist of three to five points. Allocate one paragraph to each, and reserve the final two minutes to tick off each function in your own text; any unticked function gets a sentence added.
Confusing the two past tenses in connected speech and writing: using the 'canté' form for habitual or descriptive background ('Cando era neno, xoguei moito ao fútbol') and the 'cantaba' form for single completed events ('O ano pasado ía a Santiago e vin a miña irmá').
The distinction is aspectual rather than temporal, and learners whose first language collapses both forms into one past tense never had to encode aspect grammatically. Under exam pressure the more frequent-sounding form wins.
What to do instead
Train the contrast through narration: take a short anecdote and rewrite it twice, once foregrounding completed events (canté) and once backgrounding description and habit (cantaba). Memorise trigger phrases for each ('de neno, sempre, todos os días' → cantaba; 'onte, de repente, en 2019' → canté), and check every past-tense verb in your composition against its trigger.
Misgendering nouns with the '-axe' and '-ción' suffixes and their articles, writing 'o linguaxe', 'o paisaxe', 'a costume' for 'o costume', 'a dor' for 'o dor', or giving feminine articles to '-or' nouns such as 'a calor', 'a cor'.
Spanish interference: the Spanish cognates have the opposite gender ('el lenguaje', 'el paisaje', 'el color', 'la costumbre'), and the Galician forms look identical enough that the gender is assumed rather than learned.
What to do instead
Keep a gender log organised by ending: '-axe' and '-ción' are feminine (a linguaxe, a paisaxe, a nación); '-or' abstract nouns are mostly feminine (a calor, a cor, a dor) but 'o amor', 'o sabor', 'o labor' are masculine. Write each new noun with its article and a short phrase, and revise the list before the written paper.
Using Spanish or Castilianised forms instead of Galician ones in writing: 'también' for 'tamén', 'además' for 'ademais', 'hacia' for 'cara a', 'hasta' for 'ata', 'sin embargo' for 'no entanto', 'aunque' for 'aínda que', or 'el/la' articles instead of 'o/a'.
The candidate's input is dominated by Spanish media and by spoken Galician heavily influenced by Spanish, so high-frequency connectors are retrieved in the wrong language, especially when writing quickly.
What to do instead
Memorise a closed list of fifteen to twenty discourse connectors in Galician only (tamén, ademais, no entanto, aínda que, polo tanto, xa que, malia que, así e todo, porén, cara a, ata, sen dúbida) and practise inserting them into paragraphs. In the final proofread, scan specifically for these words rather than reading for meaning.
Applying Spanish spelling rules to Galician: writing 'año' for 'ano', 'niño' for 'niño/ninho' confusion, 'guitarra' with 'rr' where Galician has 'guitarra' but 'carro' vs 'caro' confused, or omitting the diacritic in 'é' (verb) versus 'e' (conjunction) and 'má' versus 'ma'.
Spanish orthography is overlearned and the two systems overlap in most words, so the few contrastive rules (no 'ñ', 'nh' and 'lh' instead of 'll', different accent conventions) are applied only when consciously recalled.
What to do instead
Isolate the contrastive rules and make a one-page contrast sheet: Galician has no 'ñ' (ano, neno, mañá is written 'mañá' but 'mañá' vs 'maña'-check each), uses 'nh'/'lh' (camiño, traballo, muller, allo), and distinguishes 'e/é', 'mais/máis'. Then do a targeted dictation or transcription of twenty words per day and mark only these features.
Answering a listening or reading item from a single matching word rather than from the full utterance, so a distractor containing the same keyword as the question is chosen over the option that paraphrases the actual meaning.
Keyword spotting is a fast, low-effort strategy that worked at lower levels where items were more literal. At C1, options are deliberately paraphrased and distractors recycle the audio's vocabulary.
What to do instead
Change the sequence: read the options first and predict the idea each one expresses, then listen or read for the idea, not the word. Justify each choice by quoting or recalling the phrase that supports it, and reject any option you selected only because a word matched.
Ignoring the register and situational context in reading or listening items about social interaction, e.g. treating an ironic or polite indirect reproach ('Home, tampouco era para tanto') as literal praise, or missing that a speaker is refusing an invitation.
C1 texts test pragmatic inference, but candidates decode propositional content only and have little practice with Galician conversational implicature, which differs in formula from Spanish.
What to do instead
Study a short list of Galician politeness and hedging formulas (home, vaia, olla, se cadra, non sei eu, se non che importa, xa me contarás) and what they signal in context. In practice items, ask 'what does the speaker want the other person to do?' before choosing an answer.
Treating Galician as a single uniform language and failing items that hinge on dialect variation (western 'non' vs eastern 'non' forms, 'có'/'co', seseo/gheada, 'fun' vs 'fum', lexicon such as 'xantar' vs 'comer' or 'parvo' vs 'tonto'), or assuming a form is wrong because it is not the one used locally.
Candidates learn one variety, usually their own or the textbook's, and the exam's sociolinguistic items assume awareness that standard Galician admits variants, with the norms of the RAG as reference.
What to do instead
Learn the main isoglosses as a map: western vs central vs eastern blocks, the 'gheada' and 'seseo' areas, and the plural of '-n' words ('cancións' vs 'cancións'). Practise identifying a speaker's origin from three diagnostic features, and treat standard written norms as the target for production while recognising variants in comprehension.
Writing about Galician language and society using only vague generalities ('o galego está en perigo', 'hai que protexelo') without concrete data, institutional names, or legal references, and confusing the roles of the RAG, the Instituto da Lingua Galega, and the Xunta's language policy.
Candidates prepare sociolinguistic content by memorising slogans rather than facts, and they have not distinguished the normative body (RAG) from the research body (ILG) or from political administration.
What to do instead
Build a fact sheet with five headings: legal status (Estatuto de Autonomía, Lei de normalización lingüística), the RAG and its norms, the ILG and its atlas/corpus work, education and media presence, and demographic data on speakers by age and area. For each, memorise two concrete facts and one example, and practise writing a 120-word opinion paragraph that cites at least two of them.