5 English words that trick Italian learners in Sardinia (and how to avoid them)

L’Accademia — Cagliari · Inglese · 4 min read

If you’ve chosen to learn Italian in Italy, welcome — you’re joining a whole family of students who fell a little in love with this language, and with Cagliari, right where the sea meets the old city walls.

But before that love story gets too smooth, English will play a trick on you. Some Italian words look almost identical to English ones, yet mean something completely different. Linguists call them false friends — falsi amici — and they trip up almost every student we’ve ever taught, no matter their level.

The good news: once you spot the pattern, you stop falling for it. And the fastest way to make it stick isn’t a textbook, it’s living the mistake once, out loud, here in Sardinia.

Take libreria. You’ve just finished class and want a quiet corner to review your notes, so you ask a local: “Dov’è la libreria?” They’ll kindly point you to a bookshop, not a library. The word you actually want is biblioteca — worth remembering, because Cagliari’s public library, the MEM (Mediateca del Mediterraneo), is a lovely place to study between lessons.

Then there’s attualmente, which has nothing to do with actually. If you tell your host family “attualmente, amo la pasta con la bottarga,” they’ll hear “currently” or “at the moment,” not the emphasis you meant. For that, Italians reach for in realtà or veramente — “In realtà, non avevo mai assaggiato la bottarga prima di venire in Sardegna.”

The last one is the sneakiest. Tell a classmate “Non voglio pretendere di essere bravo in italiano,” meaning you don’t want to pretend, and you’ve actually said something closer to “I don’t want to demand to be good at Italian” — pretendere means to demand or expect, almost the opposite of modesty. The verb you’re after is fingere: “Non fingere di capire se non hai capito — chiedi pure!” — advice we give every student, in class and out of it.

False friends are tricky precisely because they feel familiar — your brain wants to trust them. The fastest way to stop confusing them is to use them, wrong and then right, again and again, until the correct meaning finally sticks. That’s exactly what happens every day in our classrooms and around Cagliari: real situations, real mistakes, real progress.