It seems to me that with those "false friends" (as they are often called) my brain relatively quickly adapts to actually recall the foreign meaning instead of my native. Just today, I was completely shocked when a friend mentioned the word "Losung" in Russian, which I immediately recognized as derived from German... And, well, what drove me especially crazy is that in Russian it's masculine but in German - feminine...

Also there seems to be a sort of successful compartmentalization (right, okay, I seem to have got all the syllables). When I think about the German "Gift" something about those particular sounds, especially the "g" and the "i" evokes unpleasantness. Then I "switch" my brain to the English mode, and "Gift" takes on the connotations of, well, a bright red package with white stripes.

Interestingly, I've just looked in the dictionary and apparently the root meaning for "Gift" is much closer to how it ended up in English, than in German.