Dr Suzanne Kobeisse
After years of teaching French to British learners at every level, certain mistakes come up again and again. That is not a criticism. It is simply what happens when one language's habits collide with another's structure. The patterns of English are deeply embedded, and they push back against French in very predictable ways. Knowing what those ways are gives you a significant advantage.
This post covers the three biggest areas: pronunciation, grammar, and false friends. Each section identifies the mistake, explains why it happens, and tells you what to do instead.
Pronunciation: the sounds that trip British learners up most
The French R
This is the one that causes the most anxiety. The French R (le R français) is produced at the back of the throat, not at the front of the mouth like the English R. It is a voiced uvular fricative, if you want the technical term, which means it involves a gentle vibration or friction at the very back of your mouth, near where the soft palate meets the throat.
The mistake is to use a rolled or English-style R. Both are immediately noticeable to French ears and can make a word harder to understand. Rue (street) with an English R sounds quite different from rue with a French one.
The fix: start by making a gentle gargling sound at the back of your throat. Then gradually shape it into a voiced sound. The French R is not aggressive or rolled. It is quite soft in everyday speech. Listen carefully to French speakers, particularly in the middle of words rather than at the start, and imitate the sound you hear.
Nasal vowels
English does not really have nasal vowels. French has four. They appear in words like pain (bread), vin (wine), bon (good), and un (a/one). The airflow passes partly through the nose when you produce these sounds, which changes their quality entirely.
The most common British mistake is to pronounce the N at the end of these vowels as a separate consonant. So pain becomes "pan" rather than the correct nasal vowel sound. Or bon becomes "bon" with a hard N, which sounds more like the English word "bond" minus the D.
The fix: listen carefully to how the vowel sounds before the N, and notice that the N itself is not fully pronounced as a consonant. It is absorbed into the vowel. The best approach is imitation: find a word you need and listen to it repeated by a native speaker until your mouth starts to find the shape on its own.
H aspiré vs H muet
French has two kinds of H. The h muet (silent H) allows liaison and elision: l'homme (the man), les hommes with a liaison Z sound. The h aspiré (aspirate H) blocks liaison: le hibou (the owl), not l'hibou.
Neither H is actually pronounced. The distinction is entirely about what happens to surrounding sounds. Most dictionaries mark aspirate H words with an asterisk or special symbol. The honest advice: learn the most common aspirate H words individually rather than trying to apply a rule. There are not many, and the most useful ones come up quickly in practice.
Grammar: where British learners get tangled
Être vs avoir in the past tense
In English, we form all past tenses with "have": I have gone, I have eaten, I have arrived. In French, the passé composé (the main conversational past tense) uses two different auxiliary verbs: avoir (to have) for most verbs, and être (to be) for a specific group.
The verbs that take être are a closed set, and they mostly involve movement or change of state: aller (to go), venir (to come), partir (to leave), arriver (to arrive), naître (to be born), mourir (to die), and about a dozen more. All reflexive verbs also take être.
The mistake is to use avoir for everything. J'ai allé instead of je suis allé. It is understandable but incorrect, and it will sound wrong to any French speaker immediately.
The fix: learn the être verbs as a group and practise them until they become automatic. The famous mnemonic device of a house (DR MRS VANDERTRAMP or similar) works for some people. For others, repetition of the most common ones in context is quicker. Focus on the verbs you actually use: aller, venir, partir, arriver. Those four cover a large proportion of real usage.
Gender confusion
Every French noun has a gender, masculine or feminine, and it affects the articles (le/la/un/une), adjective agreements, and pronoun references. There is no reliable rule that tells you the gender of every word. You have to learn it.
The fix is not to try to memorise gender as a separate piece of information. Instead, always learn a noun with its article: not table but la table. Not livre but le livre. If the article is part of the word from day one, it becomes automatic rather than something you have to retrieve separately every time you speak.
False friends: the words that look like English but are not
French and English share thousands of words through Latin roots and historical contact. Most of the time this is enormously helpful. But a significant number of words look identical or very similar yet mean something different. These are les faux amis: false friends.
Three that come up constantly in lessons:
Actuellement does not mean "actually." It means "currently" or "at the moment." If you want to say "actually" in the sense of "in fact," use en fait. This is one of the most reliable false friend mistakes I encounter. British learners say actuellement when they mean "in fact," and their French interlocutor hears "at the moment," which rarely makes grammatical sense in context.
Sensible does not mean "sensible." It means "sensitive." The French word for sensible, in the English sense of reasonable and level-headed, is raisonnable. Calling someone très sensible when you mean to compliment their good judgement will result in a sympathetic look and a gentle correction.
Librairie does not mean "library." It means "bookshop." The word for library is bibliothèque. This one matters practically: if you are in France and you want somewhere to borrow books rather than buy them, do not ask for la librairie. You will end up somewhere perfectly lovely, but you will have to pay.
There are many more false friends in French, but these three represent a pattern: they are words that a British learner will reach for naturally, in a real moment of speech, and that will produce the wrong result. The best approach is to encounter them in context, note the correct usage, and review them periodically until the right word is the one that comes to mind first.
None of these mistakes is permanent. They are all correctable with the right kind of focused practice, which is exactly what good lessons are for.