We teach translating from English into Russian.
Usually it is a great idea to establish a link between a foreign word and a native verb, even if there is no relation between them. However, such a link may establish itself and have to be persistently disestablished. This is an example: to provide - "проводить" (actually, "снабжать, обеспечивать"; provided = if). Personally, I have never made this mistake, because I felt 'проводить' was Slavic, and 'provide' was Latin, but my students don't seem to feel that. To make things worse, it resembles 'to prove' which is also an important verb of still another origin.
Do you have any similar examples in your languages, and what can be done about them?
Point them out with examples. They are usually striking enough for students to remember them.
Hello. I think that teaching false friends is crucial, so please continue! Students are interested and curious. Provide sample phrases in contexts with the false friends, and, also, ask them to provide synonyms in English.
Hello!
If you have access to corpora (both in the L1 and in the target language - English) you can use the word or word-stem and run a concordance search for the word in question: this should demonstrate how these items are different in current use in the two languages.
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