English for French speakers

1. French → English word transformation rules

A large share of English vocabulary can be predicted from French. Because the words crossed the Channel as a block, their endings correspond with striking regularity. Once students internalise these patterns they stop memorising individual words and start converting them — one of the highest-leverage things you can teach early.

Present it as a conversion ladder — the meaning stays; only the ending shifts:

   French               English
   information    →     information
   université     →     university
   généreux       →     generous
   économique     →     economic
   révolutionnaire →    revolutionary

One caveat to flag for students. The pattern predicts spelling and meaning, not pronunciation, and not every word obeys — librairie looks as if it should become library and does not (see §8). Teach the rules as a strong first guess, then confirm. They are right far more often than wrong, which is exactly why they are worth drilling.

2. Cognates

A cognate shares an ancestor in two languages and still looks and means roughly the same. English and French have them by the thousand — often with no spelling change at all, because English took the French word as it stood. It helps students to sort them into three groups.

Perfect cognates — identical spelling and meaning:

nation · question · table · village · orange · science · nature · animal · social · certain · impossible · train

Near cognates — small, predictable spelling changes, same meaning:

The exceptions to watch — words that look cognate but are not (the false friends of §8). Minute → minute is a true cognate; librairie → library is not (it means bookshop). The habit to build: when a student meets an unfamiliar English word with a French shape, their first guess should be the cognate meaning — with the false-friend list kept in reserve.

3. The Norman layer: English's two vocabularies

After the Conquest, English ended up with two words for a great many ideas: the Old English one, kept by the people who did the work, and the French one, used by the people who gave the orders. Both survived. The Germanic word is everyday and blunt; the French word is formal and careful. Your students already own the second column.

The classic illustration is the farmyard: the living animal keeps its English name (cow, pig, sheep), while the meat on the table takes the French one (beef ← bœuf, pork ← porc, mutton ← mouton). Worth naming in class, because it explains the whole register system in one image — and it warns students that reaching for the French-looking word raises the formality every time.

4. Recognising academic English

The same advantage scales up. The core vocabulary of essays, research, law, and medicine is overwhelmingly French and Latin in origin.

analyse · interpret · establish · determine · significant · consequence · evidence · concept · justify · demonstrate

For most learners, academic vocabulary is the last mountain. For French speakers, much of it is already familiar terrain — a native English child meets these words later than the Germanic ones and finds them harder. Your students have the usual difficulty curve reversed, and that is a resource worth exploiting when you choose reading texts. When students report understanding more of an academic paper than a soap opera, that is not a fluke; name it for them so they stop second-guessing it.

5. English words that are still visibly French

Beyond the Norman layer, English has kept borrowing from French — in food, fashion, diplomacy, and the arts — and these later loans never got anglicised at all. They keep their French spelling, and sometimes their accents.

café · genre · cliché · rendezvous · entrepreneur · déjà vu · ballet · bouquet · fiancé · souvenir · encore · résumé · liaison · avant-garde

Students recognise every one of these on sight, which is a genuine confidence win. The catch is pronunciation: English says them its own way, with the stress moved and the nasal vowels flattened (ballet is BAL-ay in Britain, ba-LAY in America; neither is French). Treat them as English words that happen to be spelled in French — a short drill is usually enough.

6. French words borrowed from English — and the false ones

Traffic runs both ways. Modern French has absorbed a wave of English words, especially in business and technology:

le week-end · le marketing · le shopping · un mail · le stress · le parking · le business · cool

These are mostly free vocabulary — but French has also invented English-looking words that no English speaker uses, and students assume they are safe. These faux anglicismes deserve a slide of their own:

• un smoking is a dinner jacket or tuxedo, not smoking.
• le footing is jogging.
• un baby-foot is table football or foosball.
• un relooking is a makeover.
• un brushing is a blow-dry.

The pronunciation students learned in French is also usually not the English one — the stress shifts and the final consonants change. In English they need to reset rather than carrying the French version across.

7. Thousands of words they already know

This is the point to return to whenever a class feels discouraged. Because so much of English came through French, an educated French speaker already recognises a very large slice of the vocabulary. Students do not need to learn these words — they need to unlock them, using tools already in this guide:

• Transformation rules (§1) convert French endings into English ones.
• Prefixes carry across almost unchanged: pré-, re-, in-/im-, trans-, sous-/sub-, inter-, anti-.
• Suffixes convert predictably: -ité → -ity, -eux → -ous, -aire → -ary.
• Roots are shared: port (carry), dict (say), spect (look), scrib (write).

A strategy worth teaching: before reaching for a dictionary, break the word into prefix + root + suffix and ask what the French cousin would be. Inevitable = in- (not) + évit (avoid, éviter) + -able — decoded on sight. For a French speaker, English is not an entirely foreign language; it is one that borrowed a third of its vocabulary from theirs.

8. False friends (faux amis)

A false friend looks like a French word but means something else — usually because the shared ancestor drifted on one side of the Channel and not the other. These cause more errors, and more embarrassment, than any genuinely hard vocabulary, precisely because they feel safe. They deserve explicit teaching time.

• actually ≠ actuellement. Actually means in fact; the word for actuellement is currently. This pair alone accounts for a startling share of confused meetings.
• attend ≠ attendre. “I attended the bus” is a very common early sentence, and it means something quite different.
• preservative ≠ préservatif. Warn the class before someone reads a food label aloud — a préservatif is a condom; the English food additive is a preservative.

Don't drown students in the full list at once. Teach this core set, and cultivate a mild suspicion whenever a French-looking English word solves a problem too conveniently.

9. Common direct-translation mistakes

Some errors come not from a single word but from translating a whole French structure. The most common cluster around one difference: French uses avoir (to have) where English uses to be.

• ✕ “I am agree” → “I agree” (d'accord is an adjective phrase; agree is a verb).
• ✕ “It depends of” → “It depends on.”
• ✕ “Explain me the rule” → “Explain the rule to me.”
• ✕ “I have 20 years old” — the halfway hybrid, and the surest sign the avoir habit is still live.

The fix students need is a habit, not a rule: when a sentence describes a state a person feels (age, hunger, cold, fear, being right), English reaches for to be, not to have.

10. Translation traps

Some very common French expressions cannot cross into English word for word at all — they need a different structure entirely. Good candidates for a dedicated drill.

Watch manquer especially. It reverses the subject and object: tu me manques is literally “you are missing to me,” so students confidently say “you miss me” when they mean “I miss you” — and no one in the room notices the misunderstanding. Teach students to spot when they are about to translate il y a, ça fait, il fait, or manquer directly, and to ask instead what an English speaker would say, not what the words are.

11. Articles: French vs English

French requires an article almost everywhere — definite (le, la, les) for general and abstract nouns, partitive (du, de la, des) for unspecified quantities. English strips both away in exactly those cases. The rule of thumb to teach: when the meaning is a category, an idea in general, or an unmeasured amount, English uses no article at all.

   General idea →  NO article in English
   Les gens        People
   La vie          Life
   Les chiens      Dogs
   Du pain         Bread

   Specific thing → article stays
   Les gens d'ici       The people here
   La vie que je mène   The life I lead

The article returns the moment the noun is specified: “The people here are friendly.” Keep the two cases separate and most article errors disappear.

12. When English omits words French requires

Because this is the single most frequent article error for French speakers, it earns its own examples. When the topic is something in general, the article is dropped:

“I like the coffee” tells an English speaker the student is pointing at one particular coffee on the table. “I like coffee” says they enjoy it as a thing — a useful contrast to make explicit in class.

13. When English requires words French omits

The reverse also happens. Do-support is the big one: English builds questions and negatives with a helper verb that French has no equivalent for. French either inverts (aimes-tu ?), adds est-ce que, or just raises the intonation — so students produce “You like coffee?” and “I not know.”

In English this is not optional — a required do left out sounds broken, and a question asked by intonation alone reads as surprise rather than enquiry. Build the habit early: question or negative → is a helper verb needed? The same gap explains missing dummy subjects: French says il faut partir, English insists on “We have to go” or “It is necessary to go.”

14. Tense and aspect: the two biggest gaps

First, the continuous. French has one present tense doing two jobs. English splits them, and the split is compulsory — using the simple present for something happening right now is one of the most persistent French errors at every level.

Second, depuis and the present perfect. French describes an ongoing situation with the present tense plus depuis; English needs a perfect form. And the passé composé, which looks exactly like the present perfect, is used where English wants a simple past.

The rule that does the most work: if the sentence carries a finished time expression — yesterday, last week, in 2019, hier — English uses the simple past, no matter what the French auxiliary looks like. The present perfect is for time that is still open.

15. Verbs that work differently

Several core French verbs split into two or more English verbs, and one English verb has no French equivalent at all. faire → do vs make. French uses faire for both; broadly, English uses do for activities and unnamed tasks, and make for creating or producing something:

savoir vs connaître is a rare case where English is simpler — both are know, so students never have to choose. get runs the other way: it has no clean French equivalent, stretching across obtenir, devenir, arriver, recevoir, comprendre (get a job, get angry, get home, get a letter, get it). Present it as a family of meanings learned through examples, not a translation. And bring vs take divides what French handles with apporter and emporter: bring is movement toward the speaker, take is movement away.

16. Prepositions French speakers commonly confuse

Prepositions rarely map one-to-one, and English draws lines French does not — or drops a preposition French insists on. These are the pairs that cause the most trouble:

Time and place prepositions (in / on / at) deserve special attention, because French spreads à, en, and dans across the same ground differently. There is no shortcut except exposure and a memorised core: at a time, on a day, in a month or year — at 3 o'clock, on Monday, in June.

17. French interference

“Interference” is the linguist's word for the moment French grammar leaks into a student's English. It is completely normal — every learner does it — and naming the patterns is the fastest way to help students catch themselves.

The register point is worth dwelling on, because it is invisible to the student. A French speaker with good vocabulary will say “I will assist to the meeting and afterwards I shall verify the document” — every word reachable from French, and the whole sentence three registers too high. The fix is not more vocabulary but the Germanic and phrasal alternatives of §25.

18. Pronunciation problems for French speakers

Sounds that either do not exist in French or behave differently. Work on them in roughly this order — the first few carry the most weight.

The missing H is the single most recognisable feature of a French accent, and it fails in both directions:

   Dropped where it belongs:   house  →  "ouse"      ✗
                                happy  →  "appy"      ✗

   Added where it doesn't:     apple  →  "happle"    ✗
                               eat    →  "heat"      ✗

   The drill: hold a hand in front of the mouth.
   "house" should move the air. "our" should not.

Stress matters more than sounds. French places a light beat on the final syllable of each phrase and gives every other syllable equal weight. English picks one strong syllable per word and reduces the rest to schwa. A student who nails the stress pattern of comfortable and photography will sound more fluent than one who has perfected /θ/ but still says every syllable at the same volume.

19. Familiar words with different pronunciation

Thousands of words are spelled identically in both languages, which tempts students to keep the French pronunciation. The English version is genuinely different, and worth isolating.

Two forces act in every row: stress moves to the front, and the unstressed syllables collapse. Village and image are the clearest examples — same letters, but English lands hard on the first syllable and crushes the -age down to a mumbled -ij. The word's shape matters more than its individual sounds.

20. Words French speakers commonly mispronounce

Words that reliably cause trouble, and why. These reward drilling one at a time.

The theme repeats: English does not reward students for pronouncing every letter evenly. Often the correct pronunciation is less than the spelling promises, not more.

21. Common spelling problems

The shared vocabulary is a spelling trap as much as a gift, because the two languages double their consonants in different places. These are the ones that survive into advanced writing:

The -ough family is English at its least logical — one spelling, many sounds. The only remedy is learning each word individually:

One consolation for students taught British English: many BrE spellings are simply the French ones kept intact — centre, theatre, colour, programme. American English regularised them (center, theater, color, program), so a French speaker writing BrE has fewer decisions to make.

22. Silent letters — and the ones English insists on saying

French speakers are already comfortable with silent letters; the problem is that the two languages silence different ones. A few even match, which is worth pointing out as a freebie.

The bigger trap runs the other way. French silences most final consonants; English pronounces them, and the difference is often the whole word:

   French drops the final consonant:  petit  →  "peti"
   English does not:                  cat    →  "cat"   (say the t)
                                      hard   →  "hard"  (say the d)
                                      cars   →  "cars"  (say the s)

   Lost endings cost grammar, not just sound:
   "walk" vs "walked"   "cat" vs "cats"   "he work" vs "he works"

Teach the silent letters by pattern — silent k before n (knife, knee, know), silent b after m (climb, thumb, comb) — and drill the final consonants as a grammar exercise, not a pronunciation one. When a student's plurals and past tenses go missing in speech, the cause is usually here.

23. English collocations that feel strange

A collocation is a pair of words that habitually go together. Breaking one is not grammatically wrong — it just sounds foreign. The trouble is that English and French often pick different partner words for the same idea, and French leans especially hard on faire, prendre, and poser.

There is no deep logic here — these are conventions. The way in is to teach the noun and its usual partner together: not rain but heavy rain; not mistake but make a mistake. Storing the pair costs no more than storing the noun.

24. Expressions that cannot be translated literally

Some everyday actions use fixed verb + noun combinations that will not survive a word-for-word translation. Each is best taught as a single unit:

have breakfast · take a shower · make a decision · pay attention · tell the truth · catch a bus

French reaches for prendre le petit déjeuner, prendre une douche, faire attention, dire la vérité, prendre le bus — and the pattern that emerges is that French uses two verbs where English uses six. The English verb is not something a student can reason toward; it is fixed by convention. When one comes up, store the whole phrase, verb included.

25. Phrasal verbs — and why French speakers avoid them

Phrasal verbs — a verb plus a particle like up, off, or over — are among the hardest parts of English, because the particle changes the meaning completely. French has nothing like them. What French does have is a single Latinate verb for each idea — and because English borrowed that verb too, students always have an escape route.

This is why a French speaker's English can be simultaneously advanced and unnatural: “I will postpone the meeting” is correct, but a colleague would say “I'll put the meeting off.” The escape route always works, which is exactly why it needs closing — teach the phrasal verb as the default and keep the Latinate verb for writing. Grouping by base verb makes the load manageable:

Base verb: GET

The same word, get, means five different things depending on the particle — which is exactly why phrasal verbs cannot be decoded from their parts. Teach them in sets like this one, with the French equivalent as an anchor, and the meanings stop feeling arbitrary.

26. English idioms compared with French idioms

An idiom is a phrase whose meaning cannot be worked out from its individual words. Both languages have thousands, and comparing them is genuinely enjoyable for a class — students often find French has an idiom for the same idea, sometimes with an almost identical image, sometimes with one gloriously unrelated.

Same idea, similar image:

Same idea, different image:

The lesson to drive home: never translate an idiom word for word. Students should learn the idea each idiom expresses and match it to the equivalent expression in the other language — the images are there to be enjoyed, not converted.

27. British vs American vocabulary

English is not one target. British and American English differ in spelling, pronunciation, and — most visibly — everyday vocabulary. Neither is “more correct”; what matters is being consistent and knowing that the same object has two common names.

The last two rows are a nice detail for a French class: where British English kept the French word, American English reached elsewhere — aubergine against eggplant, courgette against Italian zucchini. French schools generally teach British English, and BrE spelling and vocabulary are indeed the closer fit. But American English dominates film, technology, and much of the internet, so students will meet both constantly. Pick the variety that fits where the class is headed, keep it consistent, and make sure students can recognise the other.