False Friends – Protect your students against these linguistic con artists

Translation is tricky, requiring strong language skills and creativity. Students traditionally struggle with this part of the A Level exams and can easily come unstuck when they encounter those classic fraudsters: false friends. Amusing as the results can be, students often lose marks for errors like the following:

  • French: ‘The boy fell over and blessed himself’
  • Spanish: ‘My father carries a carpet to work every day’
  • German: ‘The President came to the balcony and winked at the crowd’

In the examples above, something has obviously gone awry. Things get more complicated when the differences between the two words are more subtle. For students used to looking for similarities to their native language, false friends can seem like a purposeful trick, designed to catch them out.

ZigZag Education’s range of False Friends – Translation Supplement workbooks for French, Spanish and German provides students with valuable practice at recognising common examples of these linguistic con artists.

False Friends – Translation Supplements
Stop your students wasting valuable translation marks on ‘false friends’ with these workbooks, targeting the 100 most common ‘false friends’ at A Level. Each workbook contains a reference section with full definitions in both languages, sentences to translate from both English > Target Language and Target Language > English, and learning activities to reinforce vocabulary.

  • Perfect games as starters and worksheets for homework
  • Full answers
  • Vocab also presented in a cut-outable card format for games / learning exercises

‘A brilliant idea for students to practise relevant and useful vocabulary’
J Ermina, MFL Teacher, Reviewer of Falsche Freunde

‘Very good, user friendly and suits our students. Nice and clear and easy to use’
L Gomez, Head of Spanish and ZigZag Customer

‘This is one of the best resources that I have seen… A versatile resource which would be ideal with helping A Level students to improve their comprehension and translation skills in a detailed way… It is bound to enhance all of the skills of the learner and it points out many details which could easily be overlooked because one does often assume that cognates always work well. It is helpful to be given the warnings. The translation exercises are excellent practice for A level papers and I would make great use of them in my personal tutoring.’
B Dawson, French Tutor, Independent Reviewer of Faux Amis

See for yourself – view full inspection copies right now at http://zzed.co.uk/false-friends

ZigZag resources are available as ‘copy masters’ or in editable format and come with a site licence, allowing you to pay once and copy as often as you need, or put on your server for multiple use.

The False Friends Translation Supplements are available as photocopy masters with site licence (£24–34). Also available in:

  1. Easy-printing PDF files (add 30%+VAT), or
  2. PDF with editable Word files (add 50%+VAT).

Preview and order now at http://zzed.co.uk/false-friends

ZigZag Education, Unit 3, Greenway Business Centre, Doncaster Road, Bristol BS10 5PY
t: 0117 950 3199 | f: 0117 959 1695 | MFLWE75@zigzageducation.co.uk

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