Cognates are “true friends” of words you recognize from your native language that mean the same thing in another language.
For instance:
Words like Action, nation, precipitation, solution, frustration, and thousands of other -tion words are spelled exactly the same in French, and you can quickly get used to the different pronunciation. Change that -tion to a -ción and you have the same words in Spanish. Italian is -zione and Portuguese is -ção.
Many languages also have words that share a common (Greek/Latin or other) root.
Even languages as different as Japanese can have heaps of very familiar vocabulary.