Canary Islands PAU German II common mistakes
Canary Islands PAU German II · Understand the traps and how to avoid them.
Answering reading-comprehension items with a general impression of the text instead of locating the exact sentence that supports the answer, then choosing an option that is merely plausible or thematically related.
Candidates read the German text once for gist, feel they understood it, and answer from memory. PAU items typically hinge on one or two specific clauses, and distractors are built from vocabulary that appears in the text but in a different relation (negated, attributed to another person, or shifted in time).
What to do instead
Train a two-pass routine: first pass read for gist and mark paragraph numbers; second pass, for each question, underline the supporting clause and write its line number next to the option. If you cannot point to a clause, the option is wrong. Practise with items where the correct answer is a paraphrase and the distractor repeats literal text words.
Treating every unknown word in a reading text as a blocker and stopping to look it up mentally, losing the thread of the argument and running out of time.
School habits reward complete lexical coverage; under exam pressure an unknown compound (e.g. a nominalised verb or a separable-prefix noun) feels like a fatal gap. In fact PAU texts are calibrated so that key information is recoverable from context, word formation, and connectors.
What to do instead
Practise guessing from morphology (prefixes like un-, miss-, vor-; suffixes -ung, -heit, -bar, -los) and from sentence logic. Set a rule: no more than one unknown word per sentence may be flagged, and only if the question depends on it. Do timed readings where you must answer all items without a dictionary, then check meaning afterwards.
Missing negation and hedging: reading nicht, kein, kaum, nur, erst, zwar ... aber, or nicht nur ... sondern auch as if they were neutral, and inverting the meaning of a statement.
These small words carry little stress in reading and are visually short, so they are skipped. German also places nicht late in the clause, far from the verb it negates, and uses kein-forms instead of a separate negative word, which Spanish-speaking candidates do not expect.
What to do instead
Before answering, scan the supporting sentence for a negative or restrictive element and rewrite it in your own words with an explicit plus/minus marker. Build a personal checklist of ten scope-bearing particles (nicht, kein, kaum, nur, erst, schon, sogar, zwar, allerdings, lediglich) and do drills where removing the particle flips the truth value.
In the writing task, producing a text that answers the prompt only loosely: no clear genre conventions (email vs. opinion piece vs. informal message), no greeting or closing where the task implies one, and required content points omitted or merged.
Candidates focus on grammar and vocabulary and treat the task instructions as a topic rather than a set of requirements. PAU writing prompts usually specify audience, register, and two or three content points, and the rating scale awards task achievement separately from language.
What to do instead
Before writing, spend two minutes decoding the prompt: underline the genre, the addressee (du/Sie), and each required point; jot a three-line plan with one bullet per point. Use genre frames: informal email (Hallo ..., Liebe/Lieber ..., Gruß/ Bis bald), formal email (Sehr geehrte Damen und Herren, Mit freundlichen Grüßen), opinion text (Einleitung – These – zwei Argumente – Schluss). After writing, tick each required point in the margin.
Writing long, ambitious sentences with subordinate clauses and then losing control of verb position: verb not final in the subordinate clause, verb not second after an initial adverbial, or the finite and infinite verb separated wrongly in the perfect or modal construction.
Candidates translate complex Spanish sentences word for word and try to display advanced structures. Under time pressure the working-memory load of holding the clause-final verb is too high, so the sentence collapses mid-way.
What to do instead
Use a two-tier strategy: write main clauses with reliable verb-second order and short subordinate clauses with a memorised frame (weil ich ... habe, dass er ... gekommen ist, obwohl sie ... wollte). Do transformation drills: take ten simple sentences and combine them with weil/dass/obwohl, checking the verb-final position each time. In the exam, prefer two correct short sentences to one broken long one.
Mixing register and address forms: switching between du and Sie within one text, using informal vocabulary in a formal letter, or translating Spanish politeness formulas literally.
Spanish academic writing does not mark the same du/Sie contrast in the same way, and candidates have not internalised which formulas belong to which register. The result reads as inconsistent rather than simply wrong, which costs coherence marks.
What to do instead
Decide the register in the planning minute and write it at the top of your draft (DU or SIE). Learn paired formulas: Entschuldigung, dass ich mich erst jetzt melde vs. Ich bitte um Entschuldigung für die verspätete Antwort; Kannst du ...? vs. Könnten Sie ...? Then proofread only for consistency of address before checking anything else.
In the grammar-in-context section, filling gaps by ear with the form that 'sounds right', ignoring case government of prepositions and verbs, and ignoring the gender/number agreement of articles and adjectives.
Candidates rely on surface familiarity rather than on the governing element. German case is determined by the preposition, the verb, or the adjective's declension pattern, and the signal is often several words away from the gap.
What to do instead
For every gap, first name the trigger: preposition (mit + Dativ, für + Akkusativ, wegen + Genitiv), verb pattern (helfen + Dativ, sich interessieren für + Akkusativ), or adjective declension (after der-words weak, after ein-words mixed, no article strong). Then apply a declension table you can reproduce from memory. Do 20 gap-fills where you must write the trigger word above the gap before choosing the form.
Ignoring the listening task's situation and question type and trying to transcribe everything heard, so that a single unknown word derails the answer to the next two items.
Candidates treat listening as dictation and try to hold the whole text in memory. In PAU listening tasks the questions follow the order of the audio and the answer is usually a paraphrase, not a repeated word.
What to do instead
Use the reading time before the audio to underline the key word in each question and predict the type of answer (number, place, reason, person). During the first listening, mark only where each answer occurs; during the second, confirm. If a word is missed, drop it immediately and rejoin the text at the next question cue. Practise with short news clips and true/false items to build the habit of scanning for the next cue.
Writing about German-speaking culture or literature in vague generalities ('Germany is a country with a rich culture') instead of naming concrete facts, works, authors, or regions, and confusing Germany with Austria or Switzerland.
Candidates have not memorised a small factual base and try to compensate with generic statements, which earn no credit. They also assume that what holds for Germany holds for all German-speaking countries.
What to do instead
Build a one-page fact sheet per area: for literature, three authors with one work and one theme each; for society, key institutions and dates (e.g. the role of the Bundesländer, the Austrian and Swiss political systems, the Weimar Republic and the post-1945 division). In any cultural answer, include at least two proper nouns and one date, and explicitly mark which country you mean.
In mediation or summary tasks, copying sentences from the source text verbatim or translating word for word from Spanish, instead of reformulating the key information for the stated addressee.
Candidates equate 'using the text' with 'reproducing the text' and lack practised paraphrasing strategies, so they fall back on copying or literal translation, which is penalised and often ungrammatical.
What to do instead
Practise a three-step mediation routine: identify the two or three pieces of information the addressee actually needs, note them as keywords in German without full sentences, then build new sentences from those keywords with a fixed addressee in mind. Do exercises where you must convey the same content in fewer words and in a different order, and check that no more than a short standard phrase matches the original wording.