Avoiding False Friends in a Written Response
A beginners student, Priya, is writing a 100-word response about her school. She wants to say that her school is 'large', that she is 'embarrassed' about a mistake, and that she 'attends' classes regularly. She drafts: 'Mi escuela es larga', 'Estoy embarazada de mi error', and 'Asisto a clases regularmente'. Her teacher marks the first two as errors but accepts the third. Priya is confused because all three sentences look correct to her based on English. She wants to know which words are false friends and how to fix them.
1. Explain which of Priya's sentences contain false-friend errors and provide correct alternatives.
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Two sentences contain errors. Mi escuela es larga is wrong because largo means 'long' in the physical sense, not 'large'; for a large school Priya should write Mi escuela es grande. Estoy embarazada de mi error is a serious false friend: embarazada means 'pregnant', not 'embarrassed'; she should write Me da vergüenza mi error or Estoy avergonzada de mi error. The third sentence, Asisto a clases regularmente, is acceptable because asistir a correctly means 'to attend'.
2. Why is 'asisto a clases' acceptable while the other two are not, even though all three resemble English?
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Asistir a genuinely means 'to attend' in Spanish, so the resemblance to English 'assist' is misleading only in the opposite direction: an English speaker might wrongly think asistir means 'to help'. In Priya's sentence the Spanish meaning matches her intended meaning, so it is correct. The other two fail because the Spanish word's actual meaning differs from the English word she mapped onto it: largo = long, not large; embarazada = pregnant, not embarrassed. The lesson is to check the Spanish meaning, not the English look-alike.