False friends and anglicisms for anglophone candidates
The English-looking words that mean something else in French — éventuellement, actuellement, supporter — with correct alternatives.
Anglophone candidates have a huge head start in French vocabulary — and a specific weakness: false friends. These words look like an English cousin but carry a different meaning, so a confident learner uses them fluently and wrongly. Because they usually still form a grammatical sentence, they slip past self-correction; only a reader spots the mismatch. In Canada, where evaluators expect precise standard French, they are worth eliminating one by one.
The classic false friends
French word, what it really means, and the word you probably wanted
| French word | Actually means | You probably wanted |
|---|---|---|
| éventuellement | possibly / if need be | finalement / à terme (= eventually) |
| actuellement | currently, right now | en fait / réellement (= actually) |
| assister à | to attend | aider (= to assist) |
| une location | a rental | un emplacement / un lieu (= a location) |
| sensible | sensitive | raisonnable / sensé (= sensible) |
| une opportunité | timeliness (debated) | une occasion (= an opportunity) |
Actuellement, je travaille à Montréal, mais je déménagerai éventuellement à Québec.Verbs that borrow the wrong English meaning
Fix these high-frequency verbs
- supporter = to tolerate/endure, NOT to support → use soutenir or appuyer for backing someone
- attendre = to wait for, NOT to attend → use assister à for attending an event
- réaliser = to achieve/carry out; "to realize (understand)" is better said se rendre compte
- demander = to ask, NOT to demand → for a strong demand use exiger
Je ne supporte pas le bruit, c'est pourquoi je soutiens le projet de zone calme.Original ScoreRoute lesson — written for TEF Canada / TCF Canada preparation.