The French words you already know

The overlap is the result of an invasion. After 1066 the ruling class of England spoke Norman French for roughly three hundred years, and English absorbed vocabulary from it on a scale that has no parallel - law, government, cuisine, art and abstraction all arrived through that door. That is why English has both a plain Germanic word and a formal Romance one for so many ideas: ask and demand, begin and commence, freedom and liberty.

A second layer arrived later, when scholarly Latin and Greek supplied both languages independently with the same technical vocabulary. Anything ending in -tion, -ity, -ism or -logy tends to exist in both, because both borrowed it from the same place rather than from each other.

The practical consequence is that the formal register of English is very close to ordinary French. Words that feel elevated in English - commence, terminate, profound, regard - are often the everyday choice in French. When you are stuck for a French word, the fancier English one is a better guess than the plain one.

Sharing a spelling is not sharing a meaning. Some of the most common lookalikes have drifted apart entirely, and they are frequent enough that you will meet them early. This is the reason the list of false friends sits alongside the list of friends rather than in a footnote somewhere.

Pronunciation transfers far less than spelling. A word you recognise instantly on the page can be unrecognisable spoken, because French stress falls at the end of the group and many written letters are silent. Recognising a word while reading is a different skill from producing it, and the shared vocabulary helps enormously with the first and barely at all with the second.

Register can also mislead. A French word that looks like an ordinary English one is sometimes markedly more formal, or narrower, than its twin. The lists below give the dictionary sense for exactly this reason: a shared shape is a hypothesis worth checking, not a licence.

Start with the identical spellings and the pairs where only an accent differs. There is nothing to learn there beyond noticing that they exist, and they will carry you through a surprising amount of written French straight away.

Then take one ending rule at a time. -ity becoming -ité, -ic becoming -ique, -or becoming -eur: each of these is one thing to remember that unlocks dozens of words, which is a far better return than any list of individual items.

Read the false friends once before you need them. They are few enough to skim in a sitting, and meeting one for the first time in conversation is a more expensive way to learn it.