Learning Spanish has never been easier

Written by Maria Fernandez

False friends, or false cognates, are words that mean something unexpected. They look like a word you're familiar with in your own language but they actually mean something different, often totally unrelated to what you thought. Take, for instance, the Spanish word:

sensible

which actually means 'sensitive', or

conductor

'Un conductor' is 'a driver'. An orchestra conductor, on the other hand, is 'un director'; and on a train 'a conductor' is 'un revisor'.

False friends are everywhere. You start coming across them from day one when you start learning Spanish, and they never stop popping up. To help you master them, I've made sure the flashcard movies throughout this course allow you to identify the false friends you hear in the dialogs, as well as practice them.

To help you get familiar with Spanish false friends, here are twenty-five of the most common ones. Click on them to hear them said by native speakers:

un constipado - a cold

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