Andalusia PAU Greek II common mistakes
Andalusia PAU Greek II · Understand the traps and how to avoid them.
Translating aorist indicative forms with a Spanish present or imperfect (e.g., rendering ἔλυσε as "disuelve" or "disolvía" instead of "disolvió"), and translating imperfects as perfective preterites, so the narrative sequence of the passage is lost.
Candidates memorize the aorist as a 'past tense' and then default to whatever Spanish past form comes first; the aspectual contrast between imperfect (background/ongoing) and aorist (punctual/foreground) is never drilled, and Spanish preterite/imperfect selection is treated as free variation.
What to do instead
Before writing the translation, annotate every finite verb with its tense-aspect: IMPF = background, AOR = event, PRF = resulting state. Then force the Spanish choice: imperfect for IMPF, preterite for AOR, and check each sentence reads as a coherent narrative. Practise on 20-sentence passages, marking the verbs first and translating second.
Leaving participle constructions as literal Spanish participles or as separate main clauses (e.g., translating λύσας τὸν νόμον as "habiendo disuelto la ley" or "disolvió la ley y..."), producing ungrammatical or ambiguous Spanish, especially with the genitive absolute.
Greek participles carry tense and voice that Spanish participles cannot reproduce, and the genitive absolute has no one-to-one Spanish structure; candidates translate word-by-word and never learn the standard repertoire (al + infinitive, gerund, temporal clause with cuando/después de que, causal clause).
What to do instead
Build a fixed conversion table: aorist participle → 'después de / al + infinitivo'; present participle → gerund or relative clause; genitive absolute → temporal, causal or concessive clause with the subject made explicit. Apply it to ten genitive absolutes and ten attributive participles until the conversions are automatic.
Translating middle and passive voices identically, or ignoring the middle force of verbs like ποιέομαι, λύομαι, παύομαι, so that 'me hago' / 'me detengo' become 'soy hecho' / 'soy detenido', reversing the sense of the passage.
The same endings serve middle and passive in most tenses; candidates learn only the passive label and never check whether the verb is deponent, transitive with a middle meaning, or genuinely passive in context.
What to do instead
For every -μαι/-μην form in the passage, test three readings in order: (a) is the verb deponent (no active)? (b) does the context supply an agent with ὑπό + genitive (passive)? (c) otherwise try the middle ('for myself', 'I get X done'). Record the decision in the margin before translating.
Analysing a form by its ending alone without identifying the tense stem: e.g., calling ἔλυσα a present, or analysing ἐλύθην as an aorist active, or failing to recognize the -θη-/-η- passive aorist and the -σ- future.
Candidates learn paradigms as whole words in the indicative present only and never separate stem + tense marker + ending; the athematic and irregular verbs (εἰμί, φημί, οἶδα, δύναμαι) are memorized as unanalysed blobs.
What to do instead
Adopt a fixed segmentation routine: augment → reduplication → stem → tense suffix (-σ-, -θη-, -κ-, -θησ-) → mood vowel → ending. Write the segmentation for every form in the passage, then name tense, voice, mood, person, number. Drill the principal parts of the twenty most frequent irregular verbs.
Confusing contract verbs and their accent/ending behaviour (τιμάω → τιμῶ, ποιέω → ποιῶ, δηλόω → δηλῶ), and mis-analysing contracted forms such as ἐτίμων, ἐποίουν, ἐδήλουν as if they belonged to a different tense.
Contraction is taught as a spelling rule rather than as a morphological process; candidates cannot reverse-engineer τιμῶ into τιμά-ω, so person, number and tense become guesswork.
What to do instead
Learn the three contraction tables (α, ε, ο) and practise the reverse operation: given a contracted form, expand it (τιμῶ → τιμά-ο-μαι, ἐδήλουν → ἐδήλο-ον) before analysing. Do ten expansions per session until the pattern is recognized instantly.
Identifying a form's mood incorrectly - treating an optative as a subjunctive, or missing the subjunctive in primary-sequence clauses - and then mislabelling the whole clause in the syntactic analysis.
Optative and subjunctive share person/number endings in some persons, and candidates rely on the translation rather than on the mood suffix (-οι-/-ιη- vs -η-/-ω- with the perfective stem).
What to do instead
Memorize the mood markers as a checklist: subjunctive = lengthened thematic vowel (λύωμεν, λύητε); optative = -οι-/-ιη-/-ι- (λύοιμεν, λύσειε). Then verify sequence of tenses: primary main verb + subjunctive, secondary main verb + optative (in indirect discourse). Apply the check to every subordinate clause in the passage.
Analysing a subordinate clause without naming its type, its introducing particle, and its function: e.g., calling an εἰ-clause a causal clause, or failing to distinguish a causal ὡς from a temporal ὡς, or missing the difference between indirect question and indirect statement.
Particles are polysemous (ὡς, ὅτι, εἰ, ἐπεί) and candidates translate them contextually but never classify the clause formally; the syntactic question is answered from intuition rather than from a defined procedure.
What to do instead
For each clause, write four items: (1) the introducing particle, (2) the mood and tense of the verb, (3) the clause type (temporal, causal, conditional, final, consecutive, substantive, indirect question), (4) its syntactic function in the main clause. Learn the particle+ mood diagnostics: ὅτι/ὡς + indicative = statement or cause; ὅτι/ὡς + subjunctive/optative after a verb of striving = final.
Failing to spot the case governed by prepositions and by verbs, especially the genitive with verbs of ruling, touching, remembering, and the dative with verbs of helping, obeying, using (e.g., ἄρχω + gen., πείθομαι + dat.), and then misassigning the syntactic role of the noun.
Candidates translate prepositions correctly but treat verb-governed cases as free, since Spanish marks these relations with prepositions or direct objects; the Greek case system is not linked to verb lexemes.
What to do instead
Keep a verb-case list organized by case (genitive verbs: ἄρχω, τυγχάνω, ἐπιθυμέω, μέμνημαι; dative verbs: πείθομαι, βοηθέω, χράομαι; accusative verbs: ὠφελέω, βλάπτω) and check every noun's case against its governing verb or preposition before assigning its function.
Giving a vague or wrong etymology: claiming a Spanish word derives from Greek when it comes through Latin or Arabic, inventing a root, or matching a Spanish word to the wrong Greek etymon (e.g., deriving 'banco' from Greek, or confusing φύσις with 'física' without noting the Latin transmission).
Candidates rely on surface similarity between Spanish and Greek words and are not taught the transmission routes (Greek → Latin → Romance, or Greek → Arabic → Spanish), nor the regular sound correspondences.
What to do instead
For each word, state three things: the Greek etymon with its meaning, the transmission route (direct Hellenism, Latin loan, Arabic intermediary), and the semantic change. Learn a fixed set of high-frequency roots (λόγος, γράφω, πόλις, φύσις, ἀρχή, δῆμος, παῖς, ἵππος) and their Spanish derivatives, and flag any word whose route you cannot state as uncertain.
Answering the literature question with an author-work mismatch or a genre label that is anachronistic: attributing a work to the wrong author (e.g., assigning the Persians to Aeschylus but the Suppliants to Sophocles), calling Herodotus a 'historian of the Peloponnesian War', or labelling Plato's dialogues as 'epic'.
Candidates study literature as a list of names without the chronological and generic grid; the exam expects author–work–genre–century coordinates, and rote lists collapse under distractor options.
What to do instead
Build a grid with columns: author, century, genre, dialect, principal works, one defining feature. Fill it for the canon (Homer, Hesiod, lyric poets, the three tragedians, Aristophanes, Herodotus, Thucydides, the orators, Plato, Aristotle, the Alexandrians). Test yourself by covering a column and reconstructing it, not by rereading notes.