Madrid PAU Portuguese common mistakes
Madrid PAU Portuguese · Understand the traps and how to avoid them.
Answering reading-comprehension questions from a single keyword match in the text instead of locating the sentence that actually resolves the question, so a distractor containing the same word is chosen over the correct paraphrase.
Under time pressure candidates scan for the words of the question, find them in an option or in an unrelated paragraph, and stop reading; PAU texts are written so that the exact lexical items recur in distractors while the true answer is a synonym or a reformulation.
What to do instead
For each question, underline the sentence in the text that justifies the answer and write its line number next to the option before choosing; reject any option you cannot tie to a specific sentence, and train by re-reading only the paragraph that contains the question's key concept rather than the whole text.
Treating true/false or multiple-choice items as pure vocabulary tests and ignoring connectors and quantifiers (mas, porém, embora, apenas, salvo, a maioria de) that invert or limit the meaning of the sentence.
Candidates read content words first and skim function words, and Portuguese concessive and restrictive connectors are visually short and easy to pass over; Spanish interference also makes 'mas' and 'porém' feel transparent when the logical relation is what the item is testing.
What to do instead
Before answering, circle every connector and quantifier in the relevant sentence and state its logical value aloud (contraste, causa, condição, restrição); build a one-page list of contrastive/concessive/restrictive connectors and practise rewriting sentences with and without them to see the meaning shift.
Guessing the meaning of an unknown word from Spanish similarity alone, so 'oficina' is read as 'office', 'largo' as 'long', 'rato' as 'moment/while', 'polvo' as 'octopus-like dust' or 'vaso' as 'glass' in the wrong context.
Spanish is the candidate's dominant Romance language and the two languages share thousands of forms with different senses; false friends are processed automatically and feel correct, so no check is triggered.
What to do instead
Keep a personal false-friend log with the Portuguese meaning, a Spanish translation and one PAU-style sentence per entry; in the exam, when a word is central to the answer, substitute your guessed meaning back into the sentence and test whether the surrounding words still make sense.
Choosing an option for an idiomatic expression by translating it word by word (e.g., interpreting 'estar com a pulga atrás da orelha' as a physical complaint, 'pôr as mãos à obra' as manual labour, 'dar uma mão' as literally giving a hand).
Idioms are stored as fixed chunks whose meaning is not derivable from their parts; candidates who have not met the expression before default to literal composition, and exam items deliberately use expressions whose literal reading is plausible.
What to do instead
Learn idioms in thematic sets (corpo, animais, trabalho, dinheiro) with a one-line context sentence each, and in the exam decide from the sentence's tone and the speaker's attitude rather than from the individual words; if two options are literal paraphrases, eliminate both.
Filling a gap with the base form of a verb or with the Spanish-looking form, ignoring the tense, mood and person required by the surrounding time markers and conjunctions (e.g., writing 'se eu ter' instead of 'se eu tivesse', or 'quando eu chegar' rendered as 'quando eu chego' in a future context).
Candidates translate the intended meaning from Spanish and conjugate by feel; the Portuguese personal infinitive, the future subjunctive and the imperfect subjunctive have no direct one-to-one equivalent in the learner's habits, and the endings are short and easily confused.
What to do instead
Before writing any verb, identify three things in the sentence: the time reference, the trigger word (se, quando, caso, embora, espero que) and the subject; then apply a fixed decision table for indicative/subjunctive and for future subjunctive after quando/se/caso, and drill the irregular paradigms (ser, ir, ter, fazer, poder, saber) in the subjunctive until they are automatic.
Misplacing or omitting clitic pronouns: writing 'me se' instead of 'se me', putting the pronoun after the verb in a negative or subordinate clause ('não disse-me'), or dropping the obligatory object pronoun because Spanish would use a different pattern.
Portuguese enclisis, proclisis and mesoclisis depend on attractors (não, que, já, sempre, advérbios, conjunções) that Spanish does not share in the same way; candidates apply Spanish word order and never notice the resulting ungrammaticality.
What to do instead
Memorise the short list of proclisis attractors as a checklist and scan every written sentence for a pronoun plus one of them; practise transforming affirmative sentences into negative and subordinate ones, and check the sequence 'se me / se te / se lhe' as a fixed block rather than assembling it each time.
Producing agreement errors that Spanish habits hide: 'a gente fazemos', 'as pessoas que trabalha', 'muito obrigado' said by a woman, 'meio cansada' written as 'meia cansada', and 'fazem dois anos' for 'faz dois anos'.
Collective nouns with a following verb, 'a gente' versus 'nós', and invariable quantifiers behave differently from Spanish or from colloquial speech the candidate hears; the ear accepts the error because it is frequent in informal input.
What to do instead
After drafting, run a dedicated agreement pass: for every verb, find its true subject; for every adjective, find its noun; check 'a gente' always takes the third-person singular and 'faz' in time expressions is impersonal; keep a short list of invariable words (meio, bastante, muito as adverb) and test them in three sentences each.
Writing the guided composition as a list of short, loosely connected sentences with no paragraphing, repeated connectors ('e', 'mas', 'porque' every line) or a register that slips into colloquial speech ('aí', 'tipo', 'né', 'coisa').
Candidates focus on grammatical accuracy sentence by sentence and run out of planning time, so cohesion and register are never addressed; the prompt's genre and addressee are also often ignored under exam pressure.
What to do instead
Spend three minutes before writing on a skeleton: identify the addressee and register, choose three or four connectors that fit the text type (além disso, no entanto, por conseguinte, em primeiro lugar, por fim), and write one paragraph per idea with a topic sentence; leave two minutes at the end to check that no sentence begins with a colloquial filler.
Losing marks on accentuation and spelling of high-frequency forms: writing 'voce', 'tambem', 'ideia' with an accent, 'agua' without the trema-free correct form, 'excessão' for 'exceção', 'mais' for 'mas', 'há' for 'a', or omitting the hyphen in 'deu-me'.
Accents carry real phonological information in Portuguese (open/closed vowels, stress position) and the rules differ from Spanish; candidates write at speed from sound and never verify forms whose pronunciation is ambiguous.
What to do instead
Keep a list of the twenty most frequent misspellings from your own drafts and test yourself weekly; in the exam reserve a final pass that checks only accents, 'mas/mais', 'há/a', 'porque/por que/porquê', and hyphenation of pronouns after the verb, reading each checked word aloud to hear the stress.
Punctuating with Spanish or English habits: using a comma between subject and verb, inserting a comma before 'que' in a defining relative clause, or omitting the comma that separates an initial adverbial phrase or a vocative.
Punctuation is rarely taught explicitly and candidates transfer the conventions of their dominant language; Portuguese comma rules for defining versus explanatory relatives and for fronted adjuncts are stricter than they expect.
What to do instead
Learn three rules and apply them mechanically: no comma between subject and verb or between verb and its complements; a fronted adverbial or subordinate clause takes a comma; a relative clause introduced by 'que' takes a comma only when it is explanatory. Then edit one past composition per week with only these rules in mind.