False friends

False friends are pairs of words in two languages that are similar or identical in their form but have different meaning in one language than they do in the other. This may lead to a confusion among learners and recurring use of the incorrect translation may lead to fossilised errors. Some of the common false friends between Czech and English language (and the most bothersome if you ask me) include:

• sympathetic does NOT translate as "sympatický" (it's "soucitný")
• a brilliant scientist does NOT translate as "brilantní věděc" (it's "geniální vědec")
• a billion does NOT translate as "bilión" (it's "miliarda," so actually thousand times less)
• a notebook does NOT translate as "notebook" as in a computer (it's "poznámkový blok," what we call a notebook computer would in English be "a laptop")
• a gymnasium does NOT translate as "gymnázium" (it's "tělocvična," the short of which is "a gym")
• a novel does NOT translate as "novela" (it's "román," what we call "novela" in Czech would be "a novella" in English)

The exampes above are in most cases derrived from the fact that languages borrow words from other languages but in the process they alter or change the meaning altogether. Over the years, the two words may gain entirely different meaning.

There is another instance of false friends based on pure coincidence when two word evolve independently and end up with visual similarity or resablemnce in form. The example of this type of false friends may be the English word for a building (house) and Czech term for a young duck (house) but since the meaning in these cases is understandably entirely different, this type of false friends is not very tricky for ESL learner to see through.