SYLVIANE NUCCIO

You might be surprised at the number of words that spell exactly the same in French and English. How many? Try over 500.

Yep, that’s a lot of words that spell exactly or almost the same in both French and English, but here is the trick – many of those words don’t mean the same thing at all in French as they do in English.

Unfortunately, at times they are mixed up by English speakers who speaker or French speakers trying to speak the other language.

I’ve heard some of them make those mistakes at times, and when they did, it meant big confusion or down right laughs on the part of the hearer.

Here are 40 of such trap words that could throw you off, so you’d better know their meaning, just in case you’d be tempted to use them in the same context in French as you would in English. As you will see, some spell slightly differently and many exactly the same.

Two weeks ago I wrote a post about a cool software that can help you learn French for free. The reason I even know about this tool is that a friend of mine had downloaded it on his iPhone and asked me if I knew about it.

Since then, I’ve asked him how he’s doing with his French on a regular basis. One thing he told me is that the French is a hard language to learn.  Sadly, I tend to agree. However, it doesn’t mean that’s impossible to learn either. Nothing is impossible, anyway.

In this post, I wanted to point out a few areas that makes French kind of hard to learn, while I will try to help you with it, if you are learning or interested in learning French.

But before I do, though, you might want to know what my credentials in the matter are.

Do you know how much Rosetta Stone cost?

Well, the last time I check Rosetta Stone more closely to learn Italian, I found that the price tag was some 500 bucks, and that wasn’t even for everything I would have needed to be “fluent” in Italian.

Do you remember the old days when you could learn French only with a bad school teacher?  I sure do remember my bad English teachers in French schools. Never learned anything worthwhile with them.

Well, I don’t want to sound mean for teachers, but I know one thing, learning a language with a non-native or at least someone who has spent consequent years in the country of the language they are teaching, can’t really be trusted 100%.

I have to say that during the first years of my living in the US, at times, I was very surprised when I heard a French expression or word in the middle of an English sentence.  From time to time I still hear new ones on TV during interviews or documentaries.  It always amuses me.

This post happen to come out on the first day of summer, and I wanted to start some fun post for the duration of the the summer.

If you were already visiting this blog a year ago, you might remember that all throughout the summer I had a “French City Series”.  By the way, if you missed it you can always find this series starting here.

This summer I was thinking of doing something different, but cool enough for the summer, so I was thinking of introducing you to French things that I love dearly, because they are part of me since I came on this earth.  Today, I wanted to start with French songs with which I grew up with.

I hear a lot of confusion regarding the French language.  Some people are erroneously saying that there are “several” different French languages and some even think that if you speak or understand one you might not be able to understand the other.  Well, let me tell you this right off the bat, this is not true.

Saying that there are several French is the same thing as saying that there are several English.  While there are many different accents and some words may vary from one country to another, there is only one English, and there is only one French.  While there may be different accents, words and even local expressions, as long as you speak French, you can understand and be understood by all francophones in the world.

Most people visiting a foreign country will rent a hotel room and follow the tourist tours and trails, and if that’s what you want to do there is nothing wrong with that.

However,  did you know that there is a much better way to integrate yourself to the country’s language and culture?  This way is called Homestay Accommodation or (Hébergement chez l’Abitant) in French, and it’s organized by an organization/program called CLA (Centre de linguistique appliquée).  Note: No affiliate link in this post.

France is not a country you can go around on a week-tour, but if you do go to France on a week-tour, you need to know that you would be missing out.  The good side of this is that you can go back some other time and discover something totally new and different.

Each region in France has its own personality and pace.  I’m sure this is true for any country, but it’s most certainly true for France.  You can hear a difference accents and even witness a different mentality, depending if you are in the north, in the south or other regions of the country.

Recently I landed on Annie Andre’s blog, which she created around the theme of living abroad.   I was really interested in checking her out because she chose to live abroad in France. And as some of you know, I chose to move abroad in the US from France.

Annie and her family have decided to live in Marseille, France, and on one of her most recent posts she mentioned a bunch of traveling blogs which are part of a challenge.  If you like traveling, adventures, and read about it, I suggest that you check them all out.

But before you do, however, let me tell you about my moving abroad and some of the things I’ve learned from it.  Thanks to Annie I came up with this idea for this post, and she accepted my invitation for an interview about her moving abroad story.  So, make sure you stay tuned as I plan to have this interview with Annie on my next post next Friday!

I don’t know about you, but I can’t remember to have ever met someone who really mastered a foreign language that they had learned solely in school.  Back in the days I remember how my Spanish and English teachers were never able to teach me much of these two languages.

As a matter I even thought that I had no talent to learn foreign languages.  Well, let me tell you I was wrong.  I speak 4 languages today including 3 that I totally master, but I couldn’t learn three straight sentences back in school.

The French language named by Americans the “language of romance” is being spoken by around 80 million people around the world as a first language, and another 110 million as a second language. And about 10 million people around the world have learned French as an acquired language.

French is the native language of France of course, but it is spoken in some 54 countries such as Canada, Belgium, Switzerland, Luxembourg and Francophone Africa.