If you speak English, you begin French with a large vocabulary that has already been paid for. Most learners never systematically withdraw it.
The reason is historical. For three hundred years after the Norman Conquest of 1066, French was the language of the English court, the aristocracy and the law. English absorbed French vocabulary on a scale that has no real parallel — today roughly a third of English words trace back to French, concentrated in abstract nouns, legal terminology and the vocabulary of food. Open a French text and you will recognise more than you expect.
The gap is between recognising a word and producing it. The three tiers below run from easiest to hardest, and each one asks something different of you.
Tier 1: identical spelling, identical meaning
You don't study these. You confirm them:
document · message · service · restaurant · culture · information · association · image · possible · festival · point · internet · blog
Same spelling, same meaning. The one thing you do have to add is gender — French nouns are masculine or feminine and English gives you no clue, so le document, le message, la culture must be learned separately.
The point of this tier isn't the learning. It's calibration: your French vocabulary has never been zero, and knowing that changes how you approach the rest.
Tier 2: accents only
Identical meaning, one mark of difference:
| English | French |
|---|---|
| experience | expérience |
| region | région |
| theatre | théâtre |
| cinema | cinéma |
| telephone | téléphone |
| education | éducation |
| hotel | hôtel |
| role | rôle |
| decision | décision |
This is the tier that gets underestimated and costs points. Because you know the meanings, drilling feels unnecessary — and the writing section marks spelling. experience in a French essay is simply a misspelling; there is no partial credit for having meant the right word.
Train this tier with dictation. What needs practice is your hands, not your understanding.
Tier 3: the 14 suffix rules
This is the tier that generalises. These endings are productive morphemes, not coincidences:
| English | French | Example | Gender |
|---|---|---|---|
| -ty | -té | quality → qualité | feminine, la |
| -ic / -ical | -ique | music → musique | — |
| -y | -ie | economy → économie | feminine, la |
| -or | -eur | professor → professeur | masculine, le |
| -ism | -isme | tourism → tourisme | masculine, le |
| -ive | -if | objective → objectif | — |
| -ist | -iste | artist → artiste | — |
| -ize / -ise | -iser | organize → organiser | — |
| -ate | -er | participate → participer | — |
| -ary | -aire | necessary → nécessaire | — |
| -al | -el | essential → essentiel | — |
| -ous | -eux | serious → sérieux | — |
| -ly | -ment | completely → complètement | — |
| -er | -eur | employer → employeur | masculine, le |
Look at the right-hand column — that's where suffixes beat word lists.
A word list answers one question: what is this word in French? A suffix rule answers two: what is the word, and is it le or la. Gender is one of the most persistent difficulties in French, and here there is nothing to memorise: -té, -ie, -ance and -ence are feminine; -isme, -ment and -eur are masculine.
And the real payoff isn't coverage, it's derivation under pressure. You need "flexibility" in an exam essay: English gives you flexibility, -ty → -té gives you flexibilité, and the rule tells you it's feminine. That is faster than searching your memory for a word you may never have studied.
The trap that needs handling separately
All three tiers assume the meanings match. A set of words looks identical to English and has diverged — and they are, predictably, among the most frequent words in the language:
| French | Means | English "same" word means |
|---|---|---|
| stage | internship | a stage, a phase |
| lecture | reading | a lecture, a talk |
| location | rental | a location, a place |
| formation | training, professional development | formation |
| inscription | registration, enrolment | an inscription |
| reporter | to postpone (verb) | a reporter |
| librairie | bookshop | (a library is une bibliothèque) |
| assister à | to attend | (to assist is aider) |
un stage de trois mois is a three-month internship. la lecture is reading. l'inscription à l'examen is exam registration. These words turn up constantly in the topics TCF and TEF actually test — immigration, study, work — and reasoning from English produces sentences a French speaker will misread.
There aren't many. Learn them one by one.
Working the tiers
Each tier is used differently, so don't blend them:
- Tier 1 — tick off, and add the gender
- Tier 2 — drill by dictation; a missing accent is an error
- Tier 3 — one rule at a time, gender included
- False friends — learn individually, never derive
HiTCF's theme vocabulary includes a set grouped exactly this way: identical spellings, accent-only pairs, and one group per suffix rule. Work a group at a time, or send tier 2 straight into dictation.
For the wider prep schedule, see the TCF Canada 30-day study plan; for putting this vocabulary to work, the TCF writing guide.