If your first language is English and you learn French, you soon come across the verb ‘rester’. Many beginners fall into the trap of thinking it means ‘to rest’. It doesn’t. ‘Rester’ means ‘to stay’.
Likewise, if you’re English and learning Italian, you encounter the adjective ‘caldo’. If I told you it had something to do with temperature, you’d guess ‘cold’, but it actually means ‘warm’.
Can anyone provide any other examples of these ‘traps’ or ‘false friends’… words which novices tend to guess mean one thing but which actually mean something different?
One fairly well known one:
“Embarazada” means “pregnant” in Spanish, but could be mistaken for “embarrassed.” Which could probably lead to some embarrassing situations (but hopefully no impregnating situations.)
In Spanish, you definitely want to avoid food with preservativos in it . . .
. . . since preservativos means “condoms.”
Also, embarazada does not mean “embarassed,” but rather “pregnant,” and intoxicado is more likely to mean “poisoned” than “drunk.”
The technical term is “false cognates” – though some of them are actually “true cognates” where each language has taken a particular version of the meaning – like English embarrassed and Spanish embarazada.
My personal favorites are the french verbs commander (“to order”, as in food) and demander (which is “to ask” as in a question), they are easy to confuse and leave the French looking rather befuddled at you when you “commander” a question and “demander” a pizza.
I’ll also throw out that the French poisson is not related to the English poison, nor is the German Gift something you’d want to give, unless you really don’t like someone.
Preservative/preservativo would be a good example of a true cognate that’s a very false friend, since in English what it’s preserving you from is becoming intoxicado, while in Spanish it’s embarazada.
I understand there’s a potential for mentioning English cushions and having a French speaker think you’re talking about pigs (cochons).
“Would you like a pig on your chair?”
The French “désolé” as in “Je suis désolé.” It’s confused and translated to mean “desolated,” whereas it’s the much milder “very sad.” Mark Twain made this error.
In Japan I soon learned that “hi” means “yes”, as in “can I help you”.
And “ah so” pretty much means just what it sounds like.
And if you hear a word that sounds like english, it most likely is. Young people in Japan when I was there (late 60’s) loved to try out their “rocky roll” english on us.
Peace,
mangeorge
Not quite - s’ennuyer means to be bored (it’s a reflexive verb). According to this dictionary , ennuyer means to bore and can also mean to annoy. ennuye (acute accent on the last e) means worried, bothered, annoyed, put out.
A lot of these false cognates aren’t so false if you just develop a sense of which words in English are of Germanic origin and which came in thru one of the Romance languages. For something a bit more confusing, look at the Danish word skjorte, which means shirt. (Same word in Norwegian, skjorta in Swedish.) Both the English word “shirt” and “skirt” came from the same Old English or Old Norse word skyrte/a, but divereged somewhere along the line, with skirt taking on the meaning of a lady’s garment. Someone more knowledgeable might chime in, but I’m guessing that “skirt” came from Old Norse, and shirt came from Old English, with the k -> h shift taking place before the Old Norse word came into the English language.
