2.1 You already read French — 1,000 words for free — Epoché
What you will be able to do Read French words that are spelled exactly as they are spelled in English, and know how to check your guesses when you read them. Read many of the content words in an ordinary French sentence without a dictionary, using nothing but the shapes you already know. Apply a three-step procedure to an unknown word — look, place, check — instead of reaching for the dictionary on sight. Name the three things that go wrong when you trust a cognate too far: the gender, the pronunciation, and the small number of words that lie to you. Prerequisites : 1.3 — you should already be able to write what you hear, supply silent letters, and read a written word aloud from its spelling; see 1.3 Spelling if you need it. This is the lesson where the work you have done on sounds and spelling starts to pay. Until now French has been a set of noises your mouth had to learn and a set of letters that did not always say what they looked like. From here on it is also a language in which you can already read, because English and French share more vocabulary than English shares with almost any other major language. The overlap is large, and it is not spread evenly over rare words. It is concentrated exactly where you need it: in abstract nouns, in adjectives of judgement, in the language of institutions, science and argument. The words that are hardest to learn in a distant language are the words you get free in this one. What this overlap does not include is the everyday core — the words for hand, bread, eye, to go, to want, tomorrow. Those you learn one at a time, and the vocabulary volume is built for them. But the core of a language is small and the periphery is enormous, and the periphery of French is mostly already in your head. Why English is full of French The overlap is not a coincidence and it is not borrowing in one direction. It has two separate sources, and knowing which source a word came from tells you how far to trust it. The first source is the Norman Conquest and the four centuries after it. From 1066 onwards the ruling class in England spoke French, and English absorbed something between ten and fifteen thousand French words during that period — law, government, warfare, cookery, art, courtesy. These words came in early, they wore down in the mouth for centuries, and their English forms often drifted a long way from their French relatives. We look at that layer in detail in 2.4 Words English took from French . The second source is Latin and Greek. Many learned words of this kind had already come into English through French in the Middle Ages, keeping their Latin shape; from the Renaissance onwards both languages also reached into the same classical stock, independently and repeatedly, whenever they needed a word for a new idea. That is why the technical and scholarly vocabulary of the two languages is nearly identical, and why it is identical in spelling rather than merely similar: both languages copied the same written source. This is the layer that makes the sentence you are about to read possible. There is a practical consequence you should notice now. The words that came in early are the ones that have changed the most and the ones most likely to mean something slightly different in each language. The words that came in late, straight out of Latin, are often trustworthy. So the longer and more bookish a French word looks, the safer your guess usually is. This is the reverse of the usual language-learning intuition, in which long words are frightening. The rule Here is the procedure, in three steps. Use it on every unfamiliar word before you open a dictionary. It takes about two seconds once it is a habit, and the habit matters more than any individual word you learn from it. Look at the shape, not the letters. Cover the accents and the final letters in your mind and ask what English word this is closest to. In a longer word an accent changes how you say it. While accents *can* distinguish different words (as in the short examples a and à , ou and où , sur and sûr — as in 1.1), for many longer cognates, the accent does not change the core English word it corresponds to. A French word that looks like an English cognate, even with an accent, is often still the same word underneath for recognition purposes. Place it in the sentence. Decide what kind of word the sentence needs here — a noun, an adjective, a verb. If the little word in front of it is le , la or un , it is usually a noun ( le and la can also stand for him and her before a verb). If it sits after a noun, it is probably an adjective. Your guess has to fit that slot, or it is the wrong guess. Check that the sentence still makes sense. This is the step people skip, and it is the only step that protects you. Substitute the English word you guessed and read the whole sentence. If the result is odd, you have hit one of the small number of words that mean something else in French, and you look that one up. Step three is not a formality. A small number of French words that look English are not the English word, and some of those are common. Step three catches them, because a word with the wrong meaning almost always makes the surrounding sentence strange. Trusting the shape and skipping the check is how learners end up confidently wrong, which is worse than being lost. Words you can read now The list in this lesson is not a list to memorise. It is a demonstration that you have already done the memorising. Read down the left column and notice that your eye does not slow down; then notice that what the right column adds is not the meaning — you had that — but the grammar the English word does not carry. The single most useful thing in the right column is the gender. Every French noun is either masculine or feminine, the choice is not predictable from the meaning, and English gives you no help at all. The good news is that you are learning these words for free, so you have spare attention to spend on their gender, which i