Basque PAU Portuguese common mistakes
Basque PAU Portuguese · Understand the traps and how to avoid them.
Answering reading-comprehension items with personal opinion or world knowledge instead of locating the passage sentence that justifies the choice, so the selected option is plausible but not stated in the text.
Candidates skim for topic words, recognise a familiar theme and answer from intuition; the Portuguese text often contains a distractor that repeats the same vocabulary while changing the relation (cause, condition, negation).
What to do instead
For every item, underline the exact sentence or clause in the text and write the option letter next to it before choosing; if no single sentence supports the option, mark it wrong. Practise by classifying each wrong option as 'contradicts text', 'not mentioned' or 'true but irrelevant'.
Confusing Portuguese-looking words with their Basque/Spanish/French/English equivalents (e.g. reading 'esquisito' as 'exquisite', 'largo' as 'long', 'oficina' as 'office', 'puxar' as 'push'), producing a wrong comprehension answer or a wrong lexical choice in production.
False friends are stored as a single mental link to the L1/L2 word, so recognition feels certain and the candidate never re-checks the context; cognate-heavy academic vocabulary increases the trap.
What to do instead
Keep a personal false-friend log with the Portuguese meaning plus one full sentence of context for each entry, reviewed weekly. In the exam, paraphrase the sentence in your own words before selecting an option; if the paraphrase depends on the false-friend meaning, reject it.
Mixing up ser/estar/ficar and por/para in written production, e.g. 'sou em Lisboa há dois anos', 'este texto é sobre isto mas eu estou de acordo', 'obrigado por/para'.
Basque and Spanish map these verbs and prepositions differently, and the distinction is aspectual rather than lexical, so translation-based production fails even when the rule is known passively.
What to do instead
Memorise fixed frames rather than rules alone: 'sou de + origin', 'estou em + place, estado temporário', 'fico + place/state change', 'há + time period', 'por + causa/troca/duração', 'para + finalidade/destino/prazo'. Write five original sentences per frame and have them corrected.
Using the wrong past tense in narration: the imperfect where the preterite is required (or vice versa), and the pluperfect formed with 'ter' + participle when the compound form is not the intended meaning, e.g. 'quando era pequeno, fui a Lisboa' versus 'quando era pequeno, ia a Lisboa todos os anos'.
Portuguese draws the perfect/imperfect and 'pretérito perfeito composto' distinctions more sharply than Basque or Spanish habits suggest, and the candidate narrates by translating tense by tense.
What to do instead
Before writing, mark each verb as background (imperfect: description, habit, ongoing scene) or event (preterite: completed action). Then check 'tenho feito' (repeated up to now) versus 'fiz' (single completed). Rewrite a 100-word anecdote twice, once in the imperfect frame and once with preterite events.
Breaking agreement in gender, number and person, especially adjective–noun and participle–subject agreement, and dropping the personal infinitive: 'as pessoas estava cansado', 'os documentos foi enviado', 'é importante nós saber'.
Agreement is checked late in the writing process, and inflected infinitive has no equivalent in Basque or Spanish, so the candidate defaults to the conjugated or uninflected form.
What to do instead
Do a dedicated agreement pass after drafting: circle every noun and connect it to its article, adjective and participle; then check every infinitive after prepositions or impersonal expressions for person inflection ('antes de sairmos', 'é importante sabermos').
Placing object pronouns wrongly or omitting them: writing 'vi o filme e gostei' instead of 'gostei dele', putting the pronoun after the verb where proclisis is obligatory ('me disse' after an attractor such as 'não', 'que', 'já'), or ignoring contraction 'de + ele = dele'.
Portuguese clitic placement is sensitive to attractors and to BP/EP norms, and prepositional verbs such as 'gostar de', 'precisar de', 'assistir a' require a prepositional pronoun that translation tends to drop.
What to do instead
Learn the attractor list (não, nunca, já, também, que, quem, se, quando, pronouns, adverbs) as proclisis triggers and apply it mechanically. Build a verb + preposition table (gostar de, precisar de, concordar com, assistir a) and drill pronoun substitution: 'Vi o filme' → 'Vi-o' / 'Gostei dele'.
Overusing or misusing connectors, producing run-on sentences joined by 'e' or 'mas' and mis-signalling contrast or consequence with 'porém', 'portanto', 'aliás', 'no entanto' (e.g. starting a causal clause with 'portanto').
Candidates translate connectors from their L1 and treat them as synonyms, ignoring register and the logical relation they encode; punctuation rules for these connectors are also unfamiliar.
What to do instead
Build a connector grid by function (adição, contraste, causa, consequência, exemplificação, conclusão) with one model sentence each and the required punctuation. In the composition, use at most one connector per sentence and label each sentence's function before writing it.
Producing a composition that ignores the task: missing one of the required points, wrong text type or register (writing a formal letter when an informal message is asked), no greeting or closing, or falling far below the required word count.
Under time pressure candidates write about the topic rather than answering the prompt, and they do not budget time to re-read the instructions or count words.
What to do instead
Spend two minutes underlining the task points and the text type, then write a three-line plan (opening, one paragraph per point, closing). Allocate the last five minutes to checking each underlined point is covered and counting words in blocks of ten.
Misplacing accents, hyphens and spelling variants: 'e' for 'é', 'esta/está', 'porque/por que/porquê', 'haver/há', 'existe/existem', 'micro-ondas', and mixing European and Brazilian conventions (e.g. 'facto' vs 'fato', 'receção' vs 'recepção') within one text.
Accents carry grammatical meaning in Portuguese but are often treated as decoration, and the candidate may have learned from mixed BP/EP sources without knowing which norm the exam expects.
What to do instead
Learn the minimal pairs as meaning pairs (esta/está, porque/por que/porquê, há/a, mas/más) and test them in sentences. Choose one norm (usually European Portuguese for this exam) and keep a one-page variant list; do a final accent pass reading the text aloud.
Answering sociocultural items with stereotypes or with Basque/Spanish parallels, e.g. assuming one shared 'Portuguese' culture across Portugal, Brazil, Angola, Mozambique and Cabo Verde, or confusing the orthographic agreements, the CPLP, or the status of Mirandês and Crioulo.
The exam's intercultural domain rewards specific, current knowledge of lusophone societies, but candidates generalise from a single country's media and treat cultural facts as common sense.
What to do instead
Build a country-by-country fact sheet (capital, independence date, official language situation, one cultural or political landmark, one literary figure) and a short list of lusophone institutions and language-policy facts. Test yourself by matching each fact to the correct country, never to 'the Portuguese-speaking world' in general.