Guest French Post: Dear False Friends
Please welcome guest blogger, Andréa Thomas! Andréa is a native French speaker and a frequent blogger in both French and English at Lexiophiles.com. Today, she’s got a fantastic article to share with all of us French learners and teachers:
Dear False Friends
Learning French? Be careful of some words that may trick you! You may have noticed that a lot of English words look like some French words, and vice-versa. Well, there is a very simple explanation for this – more than a third of words in the English language are of French origin. But why is that? Well, to understand this influence over English, we have to go back to the historic Norman invasion of 1066, which left England under Norman rule, meaning French became the lingua franca. As a result of this, English language has borrowed many words from French.
Sadly, while some of these words are used just as they are in French, others have evolved, as have their meanings, but beware of the trap: you may think you automatically know a lot of words in the other language but they are just here to make your learning process even more difficult. But what am I really talking about? Well, you might think that learning the word argument in French would be quite easy… After all, English owns a word quite similar, if not identical. Actually, it would be unwise to think that since the meaning of argument in French has nothing to do with the English one. Unfortunately, the list of tricky words is quite, if not extremely, long. As a native French speaker, I know that I had a lot of difficulty trying not to be mistaken by these false friends, and even though I’ve been studying English for a while now, I still get confused sometimes. I mean, what is up with vicious or sympathy? My French words vicieux and sympathie first come to my mind when I have to deal with these two, and that’s a shame because they are not exactly proper translations. The same thing happens with words like confidence, caution, figure, balance… and those are only my favourite ones, meaning they made me pull out my hair when I was still a beginner at English.
However, I think the winner would undoubtedly be actually. During my years of high school, I never heard a French student getting this word right. Even though our teacher kept telling us to use currently to match the French meaning, we would persist on using actually to express actuellement… Language learning is really gymnastics of the mind.
To conclude, here are a few examples of unfriendly words that you should learn properly in order not to be confused and assimilate them to your own language:
affair vs. affaire
achieve vs. achever
deliver vs. délivrer
injure vs. injure
lecture vs. lecture
date vs. date
hazard vs. hasard
physician vs. physicien
luxury vs. luxure
to deceive vs. décevoir
Do you see my point? Though they may seem quite similar when it comes to vocabulary, English and French have some words “in common” that are just mean…
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