Although languages like English and French are very close and have a lot of cognates already. Maybe it's better to take languages more far apart from each other.
English and French are only distantly related. There are cognates, but they're hard to recognize: hound - chien, foot - pied, four - quatre. Words you might be thinking are cognates - such as restaurant, police, etc. - are actually loan words. Some are recent, others go back to the Norman Conquest.
English is closely related to these languages (in order of closeness): Scots; Frisian; Dutch and German; Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, and Icelandic.
