Errores de colocación

By the time you reach B2 in Spanish, your grammar is solid. You handle the subjunctive, you place pronouns correctly, you know your prepositions. And yet — Spaniards still flinch occasionally when you speak. Not because anything you said is wrong, but because the word choices are wrong. You produced hacer una decisión when the natural verb is tomar. You said romper la ley when Spanish wants infringir or quebrantar. The grammar is intact; the collocation is not.

This is the B2 wall, and it is the slowest part of language acquisition. Collocations are the partnerships that words form: which verbs go with which nouns, which adjectives intensify which adjectives, which prepositions cement which phrases. Every language has them; no two languages have the same set; and your native language's collocations transfer into your second language with depressing reliability. This page maps the most common transfer errors English speakers make, organised by the family of mistake.

What a collocation is and why it matters

A collocation is a habitual partnership between words. In English, you make a decision, you take a photo, you do your homework, you break the law. None of these are random. Do a decision is grammatical English; nobody says it. Take a decision is acceptable British English but feels Continental to American ears. Native speakers know which verb belongs with which noun, and the choice is largely arbitrary — there is no logical reason that decisions are made and pictures are taken in English.

Spanish has its own collocational map, and it does not match English. Spanish takes decisions (tomar una decisión), makes photos (hacer fotos), and infringes laws (infringir la ley). When an English speaker reaches for the Spanish word that translates the English verb, they often produce the wrong partner. The result is grammatically perfect Spanish that sounds lexically foreign — words that don't quite belong together.

The "make/take" trap

The single largest source of collocational error for English speakers is the make/take partnership with nouns. English uses make and take on many nouns where Spanish uses hacer, tomar, dar, or something else entirely — and the matchings cross.

Tomar una decisión, not hacer una decisión

English makes decisions; Spanish takes them. Hacer una decisión is one of the most frequent English-speaker errors at every level.

Hacer un examen, not tomar un examen

The reverse: English takes exams (I took the exam yesterday), but Spanish makes them. Tomar un examen is American English transfer; in Spanish tomar with an exam means something closer to administer it (a teacher might tomar examen a los alumnos).

Hacer fotos, not tomar fotos

Latin American Spanish accepts tomar fotos; peninsular Spanish strongly prefers hacer fotos. If you are aiming for a Spain-flavoured Spanish, hacer fotos is the natural form.

Darse una ducha / ducharse, not tomar una ducha

The English idiom take a shower transfers as tomar una ducha — heard occasionally but unnatural. Peninsular Spanish uses the reflexive verb ducharse (most common) or the phrase darse una ducha.

The same logic applies to darse un baño (to take a bath / a swim) and darse una vuelta (to take a walk / a turn around).

Pasarlo bien, not tener un buen tiempo

The English idiom to have a good time is one of the cleanest disasters in English-Spanish transfer. Tener un buen tiempo is comprehensible — and immediately marks the speaker as foreign. The Spanish idiom is pasarlo bien (literally "to pass it well"), with optional intensifiers like pasarlo en grande, pasarlo bomba, pasarlo genial.

The masculine singular lo in pasarlo bien is a fixed feature; it does not agree with anything. Pasarla bien exists in some Latin American varieties; in Spain, pasarlo is standard.

The "do" trap: when hacer is wrong

The verb hacer feels safe to English speakers because it covers both make and do. But many English do/make expressions take a different verb in Spanish.

Cometer un error, not hacer un error

English make a mistake transfers as hacer un error. The Spanish verb for make in this collocation is cometer, which English speakers know mainly from commit a crime. Cometer un error, cometer un crimen, cometer una falta, cometer una imprudencia — all use cometer.

Cumplir años / una promesa, not hacer años / una promesa

English speakers reach for hacer when they should use cumplir — for ages, anniversaries, and promises.

Hacer amigos, not hacer un amigo

A real subtlety: English says to make a friend (singular), but Spanish says hacer amigos (plural, no article). Producing hacer un amigo is one of the most common English-speaker errors at intermediate level.

If you genuinely need to specify one friend, the natural phrase is ha hecho un amigo nuevo or even better se ha hecho amigo de alguien (reflexive, taking the prepositional phrase).

The legal/rule family: infringir, quebrantar, violar, romper

The English verb break covers a huge range — break a vase, break a leg, break the law, break a promise, break a record. Spanish distributes these across different verbs, and romper (the literal break) covers only a small subset.

You can romper physical objects (romper un plato, romper un cristal) and abstract things like silence (romper el silencio) or a relationship (romper con alguien). For laws, rules, and contracts, Spanish uses:

• infringir — to infringe, to break (laws, rules, traffic codes). Neutral and most common.
• quebrantar — to violate, to break (laws, oaths, codes of conduct). More formal-literary.
• violar — to violate (laws, agreements, treaties). Formal-legal register.
• incumplir — to fail to fulfil (a contract, a duty, an obligation).

The to be trap: tener where English uses have, be

This one is well-known but worth restating because the errors persist into B2. Spanish uses tener for a cluster of states that English describes with be:

• tener hambre / sed / sueño / frío / calor / miedo / razón / prisa / suerte / vergüenza / celos / éxito

English speakers slip into estar or ser by transfer.

Dar combinations English doesn't expect

The Spanish verb dar combines with a startling range of nouns to form fixed expressions that have no English analog. English speakers often produce a literal alternative.

Other high-frequency dar collocations: dar pena (to make one sad), dar gusto (to be pleasant), dar la lata (to be annoying), dar la vuelta (to turn around), darse cuenta de (to realise), dar las gracias (to thank).

Echar combinations: peninsular flavour

The verb echar appears in dozens of peninsular collocations that English speakers rarely produce, because there is no clean English equivalent. Among the high-frequency ones:

Ponerse + adjective: the becoming family

English uses get or become across a wide range of state changes (get angry, get nervous, get drunk, become famous). Spanish has four different verbs for become, each with its own collocational range: ponerse (temporary emotional/physical state), volverse (deeper personality change), hacerse (deliberate change, especially profession), convertirse en (transformation).

English speakers tend to reach for ser or estar, missing the becoming meaning altogether.

Quick-reference table: top transfer errors

How to actually fix this: the strategy

You cannot memorize your way out of collocational errors — there are too many, and they shift across registers and dialects. What works:

1. Notice the verb-noun pair, not the verb in isolation. When you read or hear tomar una decisión, store the pair as a unit, not as tomar + decisión. The dictionary entry for tomar won't help you next time; the partnership will.

2. Read native Spanish broadly. Every native text you read is a corpus of correct collocations. Newspapers (El País, La Vanguardia) are particularly good because their range covers many domains.

3. Use a collocations dictionary. Redes: Diccionario combinatorio del español (Ignacio Bosque) is the gold standard for Spanish collocations. For everyday use, Linguee and Reverso Context let you see which Spanish words appear in real native texts alongside your target word.

4. When in doubt, paraphrase. If you cannot remember the right verb-noun pair, restructure the sentence. He decidido mudarme a Madrid (I've decided to move to Madrid) avoids the tomar una decisión trap entirely. Native speakers paraphrase constantly; non-native speakers should too.

Common Mistakes

Key takeaways

• Collocations are word partnerships that don't follow logic — make a decision in English is take a decision in Spanish, and there is no underlying rule that predicts this.
• The biggest English-Spanish transfer family is the make/take/do trap: tomar (decisión), hacer (foto, examen, amigos), cometer (error), dar (paseo, miedo), cumplir (años, promesa) — none of them match English consistently.
• For physical objects, Spanish romper is fine; for laws, rules, contracts, the verb is infringir, quebrantar, violar, or incumplir.
• The English to be
  • adjective for states (hungry, thirsty, scared, lucky, right) maps to Spanish tener
    • noun (tener hambre, tener sed, tener miedo, tener suerte, tener razón), not ser or estar.
• Peninsular Spanish has its own collocational quirks: hacer fotos (not tomar fotos), echar de menos (not faltar), echarse una siesta.
• The fix is exposure, not memorisation — read native Spanish broadly and store verb-noun pairs as units. A collocations dictionary like Redes or a context tool like Reverso Context speeds up the process.
• When you cannot remember the right collocation, paraphrase: restructure the sentence to avoid the trap. Native speakers do this constantly.