German False Friends & Common Mistakes: Stop Making Them — A Verified False-Friends Dictionary Hundreds of Fix-It Exercises

Some German words look exactly like English words - then mean something completely different. Gift is not a gift but POISON, bekommen means "to receive" (not "to become"), also means "so/therefore", and sensibel means "sensitive". These famous traps are called falsche Freunde - false friends - and this book turns every one of them into an easy win. Part One is a colourful, verified dictionary of false friends. Each trap word gets its own card: the English word it looks like, the meaning it does NOT have (in red), its REAL meaning (in green), an original German example with the English underneath, and a memory hook to make it stick. After each theme, a "choose the true meaning" quiz - built straight from the dictionary - checks that it landed. Part Two is the repair workshop: correct-it drills where a writer trusted a false friend and picked the wrong word, plus the German grammar traps English speakers really fall into (the right case, adjective endings, verb-second word order, der/die/das, mich vs mir, split verbs, kein vs nicht) and the tricky pairs that split one English idea in two (kennen/wissen, legen/liegen, machen/tun, wenn/wann/als). Exercises are grouped into clearly labelled sets, each opening with a worked example, and every answer is explained in full at the back. Written for English-speaking learners of German - just this book and a pencil. Every "true meaning" is checked against reliable dictionaries, and every corrected sentence is built from a correct one by a checked transformation, so what you learn is exactly right.