A Friend in Need Is a Friend Indeed. Beware of False Friends,Though!

Abstract

Have you ever been deceived by a friend? A very unpleasant feeling, indeed! This can happen with language learning - no, this does not mean that your fellow learners are malicious, but that sometimes a word means something completely different than you think it does based on your knowledge of other languages or of your mother tongue. When we learn a new language, we often encounter words that sound and/or look very similar to words of our own native language. If the languages are related, then it may even be that these words have a comparable meaning. Nevertheless, beware: even if a word sounds and/or looks like a word in your native language, it may mean something completely different. This article is meant as a follow-up piece of research on an adjacent aspect of the topic discussed about in the paper “Just How Much Is Too Much in the Ever Global Use of English?” [1] However, the topic is far too exhaustive to even hope it has been canvassed in one or two scientific papers. This is why the question posed in said article still remains: “Have we actually enriched Romanian by taking over English words and using them as such or have we merely depleted it of the purport of its very existence?