Ch 13 · Lesson 13French · Chapter 13 · Lesson 13 · Grammar primer
Cognate patterns
Prescribed by the AQA specification.
The short version
Six ending swaps hand you thousands of words
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Why?Hide
Most words French and English share differ only in the ending. -tion stays -tion, -ty becomes -té, -ous becomes -eux, -ly becomes -ment, -ic becomes -ique and -ary becomes -aire. The -tion and -té nouns are feminine as a : , .
An accent often marks a lost s
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Why?Hide
French dropped an s before a consonant in hundreds of words, and the spelling now marks the gap with an accent, but English had already borrowed the word. Put the s back and the English appears: is forest, is hospital, is feast, and (escole) is school.
, .
Why?Hide
A few French words look like English ones and mean something else. is currently, a is a bookshop, is to stay and is sensitive. Learn them as a set, because the ending swap will mislead you every time.
That's the gist. The full article goes deeper - more examples, the edge cases, the why - and the practice below scores like a vocabulary session and earns the same XP.
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Practise this lesson
10-question session
One question at a time, mixed across the exercises in this lesson. Miss one and it comes back round before the end. There are 22 in all: practise more afterwards if you want them.
Lesson 13 of 18 in this chapter