The French words you already know: a head start of thousands
You already know thousands of French words. You just pronounce them with an English accent. Close to a third of English vocabulary arrived from French, mostly after 1066 put French-speaking rulers in charge of England for three centuries. For a learner, that history is a head start worth using deliberately.
Why do English and French share so many words?
After the Norman conquest, French became the language of English law, government, cuisine and fashion, which is why English says beef, court, government, art and fashion from bœuf, cour, gouvernement, art, façon. Later borrowings added scientific and cultural vocabulary. Linguists estimate that up to 30% of English words have French origins, and a large share remain recognisable today.
Patterns worth learning once
Rather than memorising cognates one by one, learn the transformations. Each unlocks hundreds of words.
- -tion stays -tion, almost always identical: nation, information, situation, attention, solution. Thousands of words, said the French way.
- -ty becomes -té: university becomes université, liberty liberté, society société.
- -ly becomes -ment: rapidly becomes rapidement, exactly exactement.
- -ous becomes -eux: dangerous becomes dangereux, curious curieux.
- -ary becomes -aire: necessary becomes nécessaire, salary salaire.
- -ist and -ism become -iste and -isme: artist becomes artiste, tourism tourisme.
With these patterns an English speaker can often read French at a surprising level from day one. The work lies in turning that passive recognition into vocabulary you can produce.
Which French words are false friends?
The shared history also produced words that look identical and mean something else. A few worth defusing early:
- librairie is a bookshop; a library is une bibliothèque
- actuellement means currently; actually is en fait
- attendre means to wait; to attend is assister à
- rester means to stay; to rest is se reposer
- journée is a day; a journey is un voyage
- monnaie is change or coins; money in general is l'argent
False friends stick better as flashcards with an example sentence, because the real meaning then attaches to a context instead of fighting your English reflex.
Turning the head start into fluency
Cognates give you breadth. They do not give you the high-frequency core of French, which holds almost no cognates: mais, donc, chez, tout, même, déjà. Those small words hold sentences together, and they are what blocks comprehension when they are missing.
So bank the cognates cheaply, mostly as pronunciation practice with audio so that attention stops sounding English. Spend the real effort on the frequent non-cognates, the ones that sit at the top of Paul Nation's coverage lists, which only stay through spaced review. And keep a short, well-reviewed list of the false friends.
French Progress covers all three: 6,000 words ordered by real-world frequency, audio on every card, and reviews scheduled automatically. Your English gives French a running start, and the cognates are where it pays first.
Two words for one thing, and the French one is posher
English kept its Germanic word and borrowed the French one alongside it, so the language ended up with pairs that mean the same thing at different heights. Begin and commence. Ask and demand. End and terminate. Buy and purchase. Freedom and liberty. The short one is Anglo-Saxon and everyday, the long one came from French and sounds official.
The farmyard shows the split at its sharpest. The living animal keeps its English name and the meat on the plate takes the French one: cow and beef, pig and pork, sheep and mutton, calf and veal. Anglo-Saxon peasants raised the animals, Norman lords ate them.
For a learner going the other way this pattern is a shortcut with a catch. Reach for the English word that sounds formal and you will often land on the right French one. Do it in conversation and you will sound like a legal document, because in French those words are ordinary.
How do you use the head start?
Skip the transparent ones. Nation, question, table, danger, science need no revision at all, and every card you make for them takes a slot a hard word could use.
Spend the time on three groups instead. The false friends, around a hundred of them, all frequent. The words where the spelling matches and the sound does not, which is most of them. And the everyday French vocabulary English never borrowed, which is where the free ride ends: the verbs and household words that fill ordinary conversation and have no English cousin to lean on.
The borrowings never stopped
The Norman layer arrived in the eleventh century, but English kept taking. Cooking gave restaurant, menu, chef, sauce, buffet, cuisine. Diplomacy gave envoy, attaché, communiqué, détente. Fashion gave couture, boutique, silhouette. Ballet gave its entire technical vocabulary and never translated it.
These are the easiest words in the language for an English speaker, because you already say them. The only work is the sound: English has flattened the vowels and moved the stress, so restaurant and buffet come out unrecognisable to a French ear. Learn them as pronunciation drills rather than vocabulary, and you convert a few hundred words in an afternoon.
Sources
Turn your head start into real French: 6,000 words with audio.
