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this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2026
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No Stupid Questions
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Preferably in English. Nothing is worse than reading code with a mixture of languages. Although false friends can also be quite annoying.
What does "false friends" mean?
As others stated, it is when two words in different languages are similar phonetically/graphically.
They are called false friends because they seem familiar and you expect to mean the same as with other words that are pronounced similarly in two languages and mean the same. False friends not just mean different things but they sometimes can change the phrase in a bad way.
Note: The following examples are with Spanish from Spain, they might be different in other Spanish speaking countries.
In English Alice and Bob had a conversation, in Spanish they had an argument.
Bob is a person who acts with prudence and thinks carefully in English, in Spanish he is a guy who is easily affected by feelings.
I had an English teacher who told the same anecdote about false friends and her sister. She was in UK and the batteries for the remote died, so she went to a convenience store and asked if they had them.
The thing is that in Spanish we only use battery (batería) for the ones that are not meant to be replaced regularly, like the car battery, the laptop battery, etc. The replaceable ones (even the rechargeable that take the same shape), are called pilas. So in the anecdote, the sister told the woman at the store very confidently “Do you have piles?” (haemorrhoids, for the ones who doesn’t know).
I don’t know how real the anecdote was, but it fulfilled its purpose to make us aware of these situations.
In a nutshell, words that look the same / similar but with different meanings in their respective languages, making it pretty confusing.
Like homonyms or something different?
False friends usually aren't homonyms since the word comes from different languages.
To give an example: an English speaker might look at "rare auto" (Dutch) and might translate it to "rare car". But "rare" means "weird" in Dutch. So rare is a false friend in this case
Edit: an example of a false friend that is a homonym is "horloge" in French and Dutch. They are pronounced and written the same, but it means "clock" in French but "(wrist)watch" in Dutch
Edit 2: just a writing mistake :)
The Dutch word for "who" - wie - is the same as as the German word for "how".
Nastiest false friend I know because it's a very common use word in both.
The more you know! German as a Dutch speaker has always been a bit of a special language (I'm assuming the other way around as well).Like some words are similar (like gevonden/gefunden). Which makes sense, but then some German composite words sound funny. Because we do understand what a bahn (baan) and hof (also hof) mean. But we call a bahnhof a station.
I first learned Dutch as a non-native speaker (I'm Portuguese and lived in The Netherlands for almost a decade) and only after that did I start learning German, and knowing Dutch is both helpful for it (due to things live verb order in the sentence and many, many words being very similar) but also problematic because of the false friends and also because whilst speaking one language words from the other often pop-up instead.
I've picked up Spanish because of speaking Portuguese as my native language, but unlike with that language pair were I always know for sure if a word is on one language or the other (probably because Portuguese is my native language), with the Dutch - German language pair that's not at all the case and they seem to interfere with each other a lot in my mind.
Even though I learned Dutch first and to a much higher level, I don't really get a feeling of strangeness with German probably because they're both strange to me.
That said, I do get that strangeness with Spanish, were there are also some weird unexpected things vs Portuguese (like going along a sentence which is pretty much the same thing with a different accent but there's a single word that's totally different), though not in composite words since neither language has that.
Yeah the strangeness I do have with German as a native Dutch speaker. But that'd made sense since I'd obviously know when a word isn't Dutch, like you're alluding to.
Though I'm assuming it's not to the same extent you have with Spanish and Portuguese, since that description fits more with what I have with Afrikaans.
But I only learned some basic German in high school for an hour per week so I definitely don't have the same experience with it that you probaby do. Neither do I have any push to use or learn it, compared to French where there was.
Still really cool to hear the perspective from someone like you!
That's cool about "rare" in Dutch. It's the same in Spanish. "Qué raro" means "How weird." So that's a false friend for English, but an accurate one between Spanish and Dutch!
Damn that's cool!
There are many false friends between French and English. Off the top of my head:
"Enregistrer" in French both means to record or register something and to save a file, but you can't use the English word "register" for both.
"Défense" in French both means defense and prohibited, but you can't use the English "defense" for both.
Words in two different languages that sound the same but don't have the same meaning. Real example from my last work: The German word for "topic" is "Thema". So our programmers called the database field and variables "theme".
What should you do if you inherit a project where they are already mixing languages because they just copy pasted from tutorials?
Exacerbate the problem by using your own style that's not been used before.
It's tradition!
The only solution to having too many standards is always to add another new standard. /xkcd
TBF, USB C is an example of that approach actually working.