The article first focuses on the teaching of FFL in United Arab Emirates and more specifically at Sorbonne University Abu Dhabi. It is based on a group interview with our students intended to better understand their difficulties in learning the FFL. We were also interested in studying a sample of copies of students in order to identify the recurring loan-words and the calques coming from the mother tongue. This work allowed us to better understand the origin of the syntactic and semantic errors of our students, unconsciously influenced by their mother tongue or their second language and their tendency to translate from Arabic to French or from English to French.