Beware of false friends

As we all know, learning a language can be challenging, but of course it depends on the language in question.

As a rule of thumb, the more your first language shares with the target language the easier it is to learn it (we could also argue that this is not the case, but we'll leave that to another blog post).

 One of the first things we do as learners, though most of us subconsciously, is to look for patterns in the target language that we can map onto our own. In other words, we want to find links, connections, similarities between the 2 languages. Sharing the same writing system would be a good start, sharing the same or similar phonetic sounds would also help reduce precious time in the learning process. In addition, sharing a similar language structure could help us be more fluent without having to rearrange words in our head before speaking.

Sharing a whole set of words is even better, because not everyone is blessed with a strong memory for a random combination of letters. Words that look the same and also have the same meaning are a godsend. These words are called cognates, meaning that they have the same linguistic derivation and often the same meaning. These are indeed our best friends. Let's take some examples between English and Italian:

 elegant > elegante

 general >generale

 positive >positivo

 optimism >ottimismo

 music> musica 

conversation>conversazione …and so on and so forth.

 Keep reading for a table where a will show you a good translation trick. Stay tuned!

 Languages, however, wouldn't be such fun if they were that straightforward. In fact, NOT all cognate words share the same meaning, and if we don't know that, we can get into very hilarious and/or embarrassing situations.

 English sentence: Many highly processed food contain preservatives Italian literal translation: Molti cibi ultra processati contengono preservativi

 Well, you definitely wouldn't want to find 'preservativi' in your food!! Can you guess what it means? If not, find the meaning in the table below where I show you some examples of Italian and English false friends: