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!
Do you want to learn Spanish? Contact us, we offer a free trial lesson! 🙂