FALSE FRIENDS, SAME SAME BUT DIFFERENT

False Friends are words that sound very similar but unfortunately mean something totally different. As in most languages, there are words that look the same but they have a completely different meaning.Watch out, in Spanish-English there are lots of these false friends.

So, the other day one of my students said during a lesson: ‘Voy a la librería para estudiar español’. I knew that she wanted to say ‘I go to the library to study’. Librería and bookstore are false friends!

Librería vs Library
Librería = Bookstore
Library = Biblioteca

Spanish and English share a lot of words with Latin roots, they are called ‘cognates’. But sometimes words with the same origin take a separate path in each language, or words with different origins resemble each other just by coincidence. Sometimes that can be a problem, like it happened to my student and so many others. Excel Spanish brings you a list of Spanish-English ‘false friends’.
Hope you find this useful and helpful!