German and English belong to the same language families, this means they descend from a common language. Not to mention the many words both languages borrowed from Latin.
Therefore is normal they have many words that are similar in spelling and in meaning (real friends). Unfortunately, there are also a bunch of words that despite being spelled or pronounced similarly have a completely different meaning. Those words are known as false friends.
For example, in German, the word fast means almost, in English the word fast means quick.
False friend can be very dangerous as much as human false friends, as you can see in the example in the strip below.
In this post, we focus only on false friends, but there are also many real friends, as mentioned. Those words are really really helpful for those learning German.
If you think there is anything missing in my list of German-English false friends, leave me a message using the form at the bottom of the page.
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– refresh or improve your knowledge,
– assess what are your weaknesses and get rid of them,
don’t hesitate to contact me.
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View Comments (3)
Hello
As a native English speaker who also grew up speaking Swiss German (I know, it is not akin to German!)
I would have translated ‘lack’ as lack (of something) - ‘Mangel’ and not ‘lack’ - ‘mangeln’ as both the German and English examples would then be examples of nouns.
Thank you for the comprehensive list.
Good Morning, I created an exercise with the list that you created and in our group we found two that could be added to your list
Firma - company
Firm - fest
competent / kompetenz /competition - in a reading my group thought that the word competent had something to do with being competative.
Super! Very nice work! May I suggest a list of additions that have the same spelling in both languages? (some may not be so interesting, but...)
Band
bin
dick
die
elf
gross
hell
Hose
man
Not
Probe
Rock
rot
See
Taste
Teller
war
was
Thanks and alles Gute!