There are millions of ways to get tripped up in the French language. The most obvious is that all nouns are either masculine or feminine and there are no rules to help out with figuring it out. You must memorize them. What goes along with this is that adjectives must (in most cases, don't ask...) agree with the noun in gender and number. The number is easy, one or more than one.
But, there are many words that we English mother tongue French speakers must watch for and worry about.
Today I sent my sister a postcard with citrus fruit pictures on it and the names of each item. The tricky one in the group is "citron vert" which is a lime. But, the word for it means "green lemon". Purely from the standpoint of taste I know that a lime is not a green lemon. Another crazy one is raisin. In french, that means grapes. Prune means plum. Luckily when I grocery shop I can usually look at the item and figure it out. The only time I have a problem is when I need to ask someone where something is.
Other words that are similar or difficult in the grocery store: poire (pear), poireau(x), leek (note the plural, another difficulty), poivre (pepper), poivron (pepper as in green or red), potiron (pumpkin). I didn't have to search very far in the dictionary to make a great soup (potage).
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