20 false French friends in 5 languages

[jrineakter]

– Wait, I think you got caught by false friends. You probably meant to say, “Actually, I think there are too many preservatives in food.” Right?

– Oh yes, that’s it! How can I stop being fooled by false friends?

– Authentic French can offer you a video on the subject. Are you interested?

– Yes, please! Ja, bitte. Yes, por favor. Yes, prego. Sim, por favor.

- Well, here we go.

Hello, dear friend and thank you for joining me for this new video of Authentic French. As you understood, today, we are going to talk about false friends. False friends are two words that are identical or almost identical in two languages ​​but have different meanings in each language.

For example, let's take a very famous false friend between English and French, it's the word "eventually". Eventually, in English, it doesn't mean "eventually" in French. Eventually, it taiwan whatsapp number data means "finally", whereas eventually, in French, it would be translated as "possibly".

It can be confusing because sometimes we think we recognize a word, we think we know a word, but we are wrong. In some cases, false friends can even lead to quite funny or even embarrassing mistakes, as we had the case in the introduction with the word "préservatif" in French which is completely different from the word "preservative" in English. We will explain a little later what these two words mean and you will see that it is quite embarrassing.

At the end of the video, we will offer you a little quiz that you can do to test your understanding of what we shared with you today. Obviously, we won't be able to see all the false friends in one video. So here's how we built today's video. We first looked for false friends between French and five languages: English, German, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese. Since some of these languages ​​are close, we have quite a few false friends and we focused on these five languages. Be indulgent with my pronunciation, especially in Spanish and Portuguese, these are languages ​​that I do not master at all.

We have chosen four false friends per language and we will explain to you a little why they are false friends and what their meanings are in each language. We are in the case where a non-native speaker would try to translate from his mother tongue to French and would make a mistake. We start with English.

First rather famous false friend. "An affair" does not translate as "a case". An affair, in English, means a love affair or an adventure, while an affair, in French, means a business. In English, we would translate as "a business".

Second false friend: "To attend" does not translate to "to wait". To attend means to participate, to assist. To wait is to stay somewhere until someone arrives or something happens. In English, it would be "to wait".

Third false friend, this one is also very well known: "Actually" does not translate to "currently". "Actually" means "in fact", and "currently" means "at the moment". In English, we would say "currently".

Fourth, the previous example and the example that comes are two examples that I took for the little dialogue in the introduction, but be careful friends, "a preservative" does not translate as "un préservatif". A preservative is a preservative, it's something that we put in food, it's a product that we put in food so that it keeps longer. A condom is a kind of object that we use to protect ourselves when we have sexual intercourse. In English, it would be "a condom". So you understand that in this example the confusion can create a certain unease, it can make the French laugh if you confuse "preservative" with "préservatif".