Spanish-English False Friends: Possible Problems for the Nigerian Learner of Spanish as a Foreign Language

Abstract

While cognate words may facilitate the foreign language learning process because they have similar meanings, they may however, be deceptive cognate words or false friends and as such, become a problem for the foreign language learner (Chacón Beltrán, 2006, p. 29). This is due to the tendency of the non-native speakers to over generalize their usage and assume they know the meaning of these words which may not only be misleading, but also lead to frustration in learning. At the end of the day, the learner may only realize the mistakes when negative evidence is proved by means of explicit
information (Lightbrown and Spada, 1993). This paper is a projection of the possible problems a Nigerian learner of the Spanish language may encounter with false friends in English and Spanish.