Tag Archives: false friends
German Words You Don’t Want To Mix Up Posted by Constanze on Jul 11, 2018
Guten Tag! Making mistakes is a big part of language learning, and often mistakes involve muddling words up – either because they sound similar, because they are the same (but have different meanings), or because they are ‘false friends’ – words that seem like they should mean one thing, but they actually mean another. This…
German-English Cognates Posted by Constanze on Oct 25, 2017
Guten Tag! In a recent post, Six Reasons To Learn German, I mentioned that German and English are from the same language family – the Indo-European family – which means both languages have taken words from Latin, Greek and French. Because of this, there are numerous cognates (words sharing a common source) that look and sound…
Misleading German Verbs Posted by Constanze on Apr 12, 2017
Guten Tag! A while ago a blog reader called Michael sent this comment in: “an idea for a post… My knowledge of simple vocabulary sometimes lets me guess correctly at more complicated words. Halten/hold. Erhalten/receive. But sometimes knowing the basic word leads you down the wrong path. Erfahren is not about “to drive,” nor aufhören…
When English and German cross over Posted by Constanze on May 4, 2015
I caught a glimpse of this British newspaper headline the other day and read it the German way, rather than the English. This happens to me from time to time, and I’m always quite excited when it does. 😀 Rat lied. Both of these are English words that also exist in German. These kinds of…
German False Friends Posted by Sandra Rösner on May 11, 2012
Being a native speaker of English learning German you might sooner or later come across German words you seem to be familiar with. Sometimes these words contain the meanings you might give them, but sometime these words can be totally misleading. Those misleading words are called False Friends! False friends in language are words spelled…