Fluent in 3 Months: How Anyone at Any Age Can Learn to Speak Any Language from Anywhere in the World

particular category to be familiar, it’s better to use these cognate tips as a
guideline for finding words that are likely to be similar or the same. You can
double-check them when necessary, but the point is that you will effectively
have no need to work at remembering this type of word because you already
know it, or a close form of it. The only trick is to get used to its slightly
different pronunciation, which is good training for getting used to the sound of
that language anyway. Use it a few times and you will know this word.
Essentially, cognates are heaps of free vocabulary, and they are one reason
it is impossible to start a language truly “from scratch.” Sushi, to cite one
example, is almost always “sushi” everywhere you go in the world. All across
Europe, the words for “democracy” and “communism” have pronunciations so
similar to their English equivalents, you’d almost have to try hard not to
recognize them.
In particular professional fields, cognates are much more common than in
others. While some vocabulary is likely to be quite different across languages,
words related to technology, on the other hand, may be incredibly similar. In
Italian, you turn on your computer, and in Brazilian Portuguese, you move the
mouse. In Russian, you connect to the Интернет (an exact transliteration of
“Internet,” where И = I, н = n, and р = r), and in Japanese, you check your 
(mē-ru, Japanese’s transliteration of “e-mail”). The name of the program you
may use to surf the Internet in Turkish is Firefox, and you may be doing so in
Microsoft Windows in the Somali language, on an Apple in Tagalog, or in
Linux in Basque.
As well as brand names, you also have food or other cultural nuggets that
are associated with a particular place, originally English, or from another
language. The Czech word robot tends to be used in most languages, and
Italian foods (pizza, pasta, gnocchi) are adapted in many places.
Listing all cognates for a given language is beyond the scope of this book,
but brand names, technology words, and even some trendy words (like cool in
both French and German) are more likely to be international.
One of the first things I do when I am learning a language is find a list of
these cognates or similar-looking words. These lists can contain hundreds or
even thousands of examples. Refer to them as soon as possible, no matter what
language you are learning, and I’ll share some typical examples in the next
section.

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