Five words you can read in your first minute of French: la question, la table, possible, le restaurant, la nation. The borrowed stock is thousands of words deep, and the fastest way into it is not a word list but a short list of endings that convert English into French on sight.
Six endings, several hundred words each
Words in -tion cross unchanged: la question, la situation, la nation. English -ty is French -té: la qualité, la société, la liberté. English -ic and -ical fold into -ique: la musique, politique, pratique. English -or wears -eur, and colour, kept whole, follows it: le professeur, la couleur. The -ly adverbs run on -ment: exactement, rarement. And -age crosses whole: le voyage, le garage, le message. Each ending is a door into several hundred words, and the six together are why a beginner can face a French newspaper in the first month.
The genders ride along free if you take them at the door. The words in -tion and -té are feminine, la every time. The words in -age are masculine, with a household handful of exceptions, la plage, la page, l'image, worth meeting early. Learning an ending's gender once beats learning eight hundred genders one at a time, and it is the argument for never writing a French noun down bare: the article is part of the spelling.
The dividend works on real text from the first day. Léa's first poster on the platform at Gare de Lyon: La situation économique internationale reste incertaine. An English reader holds every content word of that before any lesson, and the only trap in the sentence is reste, because rester means to stay, not to rest. One poster, most of the method.
The friends that lie, and the direction they lie in
English froze each borrowed word at the moment it arrived and French carried on changing, so the false friends drift in one direction: the English word holds the older or narrower sense. Actuellement means currently, not actually. Une librairie is a bookshop, and a library is une bibliothèque. Sensible means sensitive, and a sensible plan is raisonnable. Assister à means to attend, and attendre means to wait, a pair that catches the same English reflex twice. When a cognate feels slightly off, trust the feeling: the drift is old, patterned and checkable.
The five small words no cognate will ever hand you
Léa's first month in Lyon runs on words that look like nothing at all in English. At the counter: Tu veux du café? J'en prends un peu. That en stands in for du café whole, and French does not let you drop it. On y va puts y where English says there. Her bus leaves early, du coup she takes the next one: du coup is the spoken hinge between a fact and its consequence, in every conversation and on no vocabulary list. It rains and she walks out quand même, anyway, despite it. Dinner on Friday is chez Nadia: chez is at somebody's place, one word where English spends four. Each of these sits in the top slice of the frequency list, none can be guessed from English, and a learner with eight thousand recognisable cognates and none of these reads the news and cannot ride a bus.
Six doors in
The endings that convert English into French on sight
Each cell is a rule worth several hundred words, and three of the six settle the gender as well.
- -tionla question, la situation: feminine
- -téla qualité, la société: feminine
- -iquela musique, politique, pratique
- -eurle professeur, la couleur
- -mentexactement, rarement: the -ly adverbs
- -agele voyage, le message: masculine
- -tionla question, la situation: feminine
- -téla qualité, la société: feminine
- -iquela musique, politique, pratique
- -eurle professeur, la couleur
- -mentexactement, rarement: the -ly adverbs
- -agele voyage, le message: masculine
The two cells that settle nothing, -ique and -eur, are the two to write down with their articles at first meeting.
What the overlap does not transfer
The stock is a reading dividend, and only that. Gouvernement shares its letters with government and almost none of its sound, so a word read at a glance is still missed at speed. That gap is why written French and spoken French sound unrelated, and the pronunciation of a word you have only ever read misses in predictable places, nasal vowels, silent endings, and liaison.
The concrete everyday world is the other gap: English kept its own words for kitchens and weather, so those French words are learned one at a time, article attached at first meeting, which is the argument running through gender, agreement, and the tenses that carry the language.
Checking a word before trusting it
Linguee, free as of 2026, is the daily check: it searches documents that exist in both languages and shows the same sentence in French and English side by side, which answers whether the obvious cognate is what anyone actually writes. It replaced the bilingual dictionary's single translation. The Trésor de la langue française informatisé is the deep one, the historical dictionary of French, free and written for scholars; it can date the century a sense entered the language, which is what turns a false friend from an accident into a pattern. The first is for every day, the second is for the day librairie makes you curious.
The mistake: measuring progress in recognised words
Three weeks in, a reader recognises thousands of words and starts counting them as learned. Recognition is one acquisition of three, and for a cognate it is the free one; catching the word at speed and choosing it the way a French speaker would are separate purchases. Twenty minutes on the six endings above buys more usable French than a hundred new recognitions, and one machinery word used badly for a fortnight, on material just past your level, and why that is the sweet spot, buys more than either.
The words this page cannot help with are the ones with no cognate and no ending to lean on, the kitchens and the weather, and holding on to those is a memory problem before it is a French one: reviewing a word exactly as you are about to lose it.