“Ich kenne dich.”
“Ich weiß!”
Hello everyone,
And welcome to a new episode of What is the Difference – the series where we look at two German words that appear to mean the same but don’t.
And today, we’ll look at:
The difference between “kennen” and “wissen”
Both of them mean to know, but they’re not interchangeable (of course).
The common explanation that you find online and that AI is likely to give you goes something like this:
kennen is about familiarity or being acquainted with
wissen is about knowing information
And this is not wrong per se and it sounds simple enough when you hear it.
But not really “clear” either. There’s interpretation going on and it is not really too reliable.
Take this example:
- I know his name.
Would you consider this more like a piece of information or more about being familiar/acquainted?
I would call this information, so based on that I’d use wissen, but the right pick here is kennen.
- Ich kenne seinen Namen.
So today, I want to offer an alternative way to tell wissen and kennen apart. One that’s a lot more mechanical and doesn’t rely on interpreting “styles of knowing”.
In a nutshell, it’s about what the verb connects: a thing, or a sentence.
- If to know connects an entity, go with kennen.
- If to know connects a sentence (or a placeholder for one), go with wissen.
I’ll now explain this in more detail with examples and then we’ll also talk about edge cases and instances where both verbs work.
And then we’ll wrap it up with a quiz.
Sounds good?
Then let’s go!
wissen vs kennen – Using Grammar as a key
When you read my rule of thumb, you might have been wondering about the word entity. It sounds quite “fancy”.
I use it simple as a short way for me to say “things or living beings“.
A chair is an entity, a cat is an entity and a thought is an entity. We could maybe also say nouns and names.
The dichotomy of actions (verbs) on the one hand and entities on the other is actually one of the most fundamental in language in my opinion and having awareness which of these two categories (verb vs entity) you’re looking at can be VERY helpful in language learning when it comes to grammar and structure.
And it’s the key to wissen vs kennen that allows us to pick the right one WITHOUT having to think about what “type” of knowing we’re talking about.
Here’s the rule of thumb again
wissen is for knowing information that uses a verb.
kennen is for knowing entities.
And now let’s look at an example.
- Ich kenne einen sprechenden Baum.
- I know a speaking tree.
- Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
- “Bäume sprechen nicht.”
“Ich weiß (das).” - “Trees do not talk”
“I know that.” - Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
In the first sentence, we know an entity – a speaking tree. So we use kennen.
In the second example, we know:“Trees don’t talk.”. This is information that contains a verb, and so we use wissen.
Easy right?
And it can really help with tricky examples like this one:
- I know her, I know how she is.
At least to me, the two parts in this statement express basically the same. We’re “familiar with her ways”.
Just the phrasing is different. So what do we use here? Wissen or kennen? Or both?
With our new system, it’s super easy.
“I know her” – we know an entity (her), so we use kennen.
“I know how she is” – we know a fact that has a verb “How she is”, so we use wissen.
- Ich kenne sie, ich weiß, wie sie ist.
- Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
In practice, wissen is used a lot in combinations with indirect questions because questions always have a verb at their core.
- Ich weiß, wie/wo/wann/was/ob/dass ...
Using kennen in such sentences is just wrong; even if to be acquainted/familiar would work in English.
- I’m familiar with how difficult it is to learn the gender.
- Ich kenne, wie schwer es ist… wrong
- Ich weiß, wie schwer es ist…
- Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
Kennen is used a lot with names, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s a person or a song or a CD or a book.
- Ich kenne XYZ.
And we cannot say:
- Ich weiß “The Rise of Skywalker”…. WRONG
Even if we know every second, every line of dialog, every shot, and every plot hole of the movie, the sentence would still be wrong simply because The Rise of Skywalker is a name. An entity.
All right.
So now that we know the basics, let’s explore the edges a little.
wissen vs kennen – When both work
From what we’ve seen so far, mixing up wissen and kennen simply resulted in a wrong or at least odd sounding sentence.
But sometimes, both verbs work but the result is a different meaning.
Suppose a friend comes to you, all tired, and says this:
- I can’t sleep when there’s a full moon.
- Bei Vollmond kann ich nicht schlafen.
And you want to reply with “I know that.”
You could actually use either verb here in German:
- Ich weiß das.
- Ich kenne das.
But they do not actually mean the same.
The wissen-version says that I know the content of the statement itself. I know that my friend can’t sleep at full moon. The fact is just replaced by da
The kennen-version on the other hand means that I myself can’t sleep at full moon either. You know the phenomenon or issue. The noun is not explicit here, but it’s implicit as a “thing”.
And to be fair, also the classic approach of “information” vs “familiarity” would work well here.
I know the fact that you can’t sleep vs I am familiar with not sleeping on a full moon.
Like I said, my approach of entities vs verb phrases is just meant as a different option you can choose.
And it does have edge cases and exceptions too, so let’s look at those before we wrap up.
wissen vs kennen – Edge Cases and Exceptions
We’ll start with an example:
- I know the way.
Based on what we’ve learned, this should be kennen. And kennen is indeed the better choice. But people use wissen, too.
- Ich weiß den Weg.
- Ich kenne den Weg.
- Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
Both sentences can express exactly the exact same thing. The kennen-version has a second notion though. It can also mean that we’re familiar with the way in sense that we’ve gone that way a few times already. We’re familiar with it.
The wissen-version is purely about knowing where we have to go. Here’s another example:
- Ich kenne/weiß deinen Namen.
- I know your name.
Again, kennen sounds better to me but people do use wissen as well.
Both can mean the same but also here, the kennen-version could theoretically express something else. It could mean that we’ve heard that name before, that we’re familiar with the name itself. Like…
- “I know your name… my friend’s dad is called Hufflepuff, too”
The wissen-version only means that we know how someone is called.
So essentially the wissen-versions are purely about how the world is, the kennen-versions are more ambiguous and can express general acquaintance with a thing.
But in these examples they’re usually used just like the wissen-version. So the structural aspect kind of beats the meaning-aspect. If you know a noun, then you use kennen, even if being acquainted is not really the focus.
- Ich kenne/weiß die Lösung.
- I know the solution.
This is clearly about a fact and still both versions have about the same amount of hits on Google,and I feel like the kennen-version is the more literary one. Now, there are a few sentences out there, where wissen and kennen are both used with a noun, and mean different things.
- Ich kenne/weiß das Kapitel nicht.
- I don’t know the chapter.
Kennen would be about knowing the content of the chapter while the version with wissen is kind of a shortened version of I know which chapter is it?”.
So in the end this ties back in with what we had… that wissen works well with all kinds of questions. Now, there’s one more thing we should mention.
German does use the phrase nicht mehr wissen a lot where English uses to not remember something.
- Ich weiß nicht mehr, wann der Termin ist.
- I don’t know anymore, when…. (lit)
- I don’t remember at what time the appointment was.
(I’m pretty sure the second part of this sentence is wrong… little help, please :)
- Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
And that only works with wissen, regardless of whether we’re dealing with verb-based information like in the example we just had, or with a noun.
- Ich weiß deinen Namen nicht mehr.
- I don’t remember your name.
- Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
- Ich kenne deinen Namen nicht mehr.
The kennen-version would sound super odd and serious… like… “Name! You’ve changed! I don’t even know you anymore.” But on the whole I think going by structure is an easy and pretty fail safe way to decide which one to use. Here it is in a nutshell…
I know [that / why / which / if / where / who …] → use wissen
I know [noun] → use kennen
By the way, many European languages like Spanish, Swedish or Finnish have two such distinct translations for to know, as well and my approach works just as well for them.
And just as a bit of trivia… Old English actually used to have two separate verbs, too.
There was to know, which together with words like diagnosis, ignore or notice comes from a root that was about knowing.
And then there was the old verb witan which, just like German wissen, belong to the same family as vision.
English still has other words from that family like wit or wisdom but the verb itself disappeared and to know took over, so to native speakers of English, there really only is one “knowing”.
But kennen and wissen are different.
And that’s it for today. Hooray!
As usual, if you want to check how much you remember and how well the rule works for you, you can take the little quiz I have prepared for you.
And of course if you have any questions, leave them in the comments as well and we’ll clear them up.
I hope you liked it and see you next time.
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Thanks- at 71 % I still need to practice
Hi
So in the sentence “ I know how to make cookies.”, the fact that “how to make cookies” is a sentence trumps the fact that I familiar with how to make cookies, have done it many times, and in fact developed the recipe?
Seems like wissen wins on a technicality!
Auf Wiederschreiben
Jeff
100%.
That’s why I don’t like this meaning based approach that much. It just fails too often.
You’ll pretty much never have “Ich kenne, (side sentence)”, no matter what the specific content is.
Really, they should have consulted with us first, or at least you.
In Vietnamese, there are two words that correspond to German verbs in a similar way: “biết” and “quen”. Both carry nuances close to their German counterparts. For example, in the sentence “I know that name”, we could express it in Vietnamese as either “tôi biết (that name)” or “tôi quen (that name)”.
Here, “biết” simply means that I know the name—that I’ve come across it somewhere at some point in my life. “Quen”, however, implies a deeper familiarity, as if I’ve encountered it many times—maybe a relative has that name—so I would answer someone asking, “I’m familiar with that name”.
(This may sound a bit clumsy in English, but it reflects my personal sense of language. It’s unfortunate if your language doesn’t have such subtle distinctions.)
Very interesting, thanks for sharing!!
How would you say that you know the name of someone or something. Like… you’re talking with a friend and you want to say that you know the name of a game or person or book as in you know what it’s called. Would you use “biết” or “quen”. In German, this is an edge case, where people would use either one.
I think the most natural choice people use is still “biết.”
Using “quen” makes the meaning slightly different.
For example, with a book:
When you say “I biết that book,” it means you’ve heard of it or seen it somewhere before.
But “I’m quen with that book” carries the nuance that you’ve read it several times.
With people, things get a bit more interesting :)
For example, “I biết her” means I know who she is — maybe we met online or in real life, through Tinder, messages, or just bumping into each other somewhere.
But “I’m quen her” is where the interesting nuance comes in.
The first nuance is that we’ve met many times — so many that we’re almost tired of seeing each other’s face.
And the second nuance is that we’re dating, and the relationship has only started developing recently.
You could say that, in an abstract sense, “biết”(know) is the starting point of “quen”(familiar) in our language. You have to know someone or something first before you can become familiar with them.
Ah, then it’s not exactly the same as in German. Like… on the surface yes, but the finer points, no.
The examples with the book you mentioned would both be expressed using “kennen” in German. “Ich weiß das Buch” sounds a bit clumsy and would only work in the context of knowing “whcih book contains a certain poem” for instance. So the book as the answer to a fact based question.
Great article Emanuel. Have you considered weaving “Können “ into this? I see it in the article on modal verbs but not in the same detail. For English speakers it can be a bit of a stumbling block.
It is indeed related to “kennen” but I think having it in here would be a bit off topic for most people coming here.
I’m happy to answer your questions in the comments though, either here or over in the other post you mentioned or in my dictionary entry for “können”.
Thanks for this one!
The explanation was very good. I got the idea completely Thank you very much.
Happy to hear that! Danke für das gute Feedback!
For Scottish people, another way that we could remember the use of kennen with an entity is perhaps the phrase “Do you ken <person>?” meaning “Do you know <person>?” Feel free to correct me if I’ve misinterpreted….
Yeah I think this “ken” is a direct relative to “kennen”. But would you also say:
– Do you ken how long it’ll take?
Because if yes, that that’s not really helping as that would be “wissen” in German.
To me it seems like if a dependent/noun clause follow the verb, it’s wissen, otherwise it’s kennen. Not including the “nicht mehr” and the few other exceptions. I might be wrong though. This was very helpful and cleared up the struggle from Google.
Danke
Yup, that’s a nice succinct way to put it :)!
You probably have seen scire versus noscere/cognoscere. Let me suggest your approach is all wrong. Couched in ambiguity, like, what’s the difference between knowing and being familiar with? My answer, as Billy Graham used to say: we know implicitly (as a Latin professor advised me about scire) or explicitly (cognoscere); I called her up out of the blue and asked how to make my motto Latin, it being “I know what I saw”. She didn’t define “implicitly” or “explicitly”. Bring this back to your argument. If I can explain a thing, I kenne it. If I know it but can’t explain it, I weiß it. What I put words to might be entirely bogus, and I’m just being polite/politically-correct. Ich weiß was ich sah (gesehen habe?), oder ich kenne was ich sah/gesehen habe. The PIE root of wissen is in seeing. From Middle High German and Old High German wizzan, from Proto-West Germanic *witan, from Proto-Germanic *witaną, from Proto-Indo-European *wóyde (“to see, to know”). My point here is that putting words to things destroys the things, since knowledge, as Thomas Aquinas says, occurs in the imagination, and you cannot imagine two things at once. “There is no knowledge without the phantasm.” ST I, q 84, a 7 See Karl Rahner, Spirit in the World. He, too, ended up ambiguously.
“You probably have seen scire versus noscere/cognoscere.”
No, I have not.
“If I can explain a thing, I kenne it.”
Nope. Can you explain a person? I don’t think so. Yet, it’s one of the main areas for “kennen”.
If I know it but can’t explain it, I weiß it.”
Again, nope. I can explain how a fridge works, and still the verb is “wissen” in German.
The decision between “Ich weiß, was ich gesehen habe” and “Ich kenne, was ich gesehen habe” depends on what it is that you saw and what you want to express.
If what you saw is someone slipping on a banana peel, you can “wissen” that this is the scenario that you saw and you can “kennen” this situation because you’ve been through it.
You set out to say that my approach is “all wrong”. Yet, you don’t really address my approach and all that you say about wissen and kennen doesn’t apply to how the words are used in actual German.
I feel like Latin might have set you on a wrong path regarding this.
Thanks for publishing my comment. I’ll bet you could not define a verb against a noun. We see the person fall on the floor. Boom. What we may say comes later. To identify with someone is part of our nature, we cannot help doing it. Our freedom allows us to enjoin ourselves against caring about that person, and we may stoutly attempt this. Scire: From Proto-Italic *skijō, from Proto-Indo-European *skey- (“to distinguish, dissect”). Related to secō (“to cut off”), signum (“a sign”), Ancient Greek σχίζω (skhízō, “to split”) and English shit. Rahner’s favorite word was, Greek, krinein, from a PIE root meaning to sift, separate, divide. I might suggest that the attempt to replace philosophy with grammar defines imperialism. Akin to replacing philosophy with ideology, which word was coined as a satire. Idein, to imagine. And philosophy, love of wisdom: the root of wissen gave us, yes, “wise”. We have corrupted that word so that it means its opposite: “wise up” means “dummy up, go along with the program.” The word is not the thing. First in intention, last in execution. Wanting to say the right thing depends on distinguishing politically advantageous remarks from true remarks. When one resolves to tell the truth to someone about something, one discovers that one must speak in a whole new way. “The bourgeoisie believe that reality is scripted.” You can’t have imperialism without a bourgeoisie. I looked up res today, speaking of Latin and reality: it means “riches,” the PIE root, that is. So you can indeed have your own reality, but that doesn’t make it a true impression of what’s happening. Proper speech brings peace between us. Holmes at the end of his life gave a speech at Harvard where he used the term “unimaginable whole”.
“I’ll bet you could not define a verb against a noun. We see the person fall on the floor. Boom. ”
If you say so. I don’t really care.
This site is about learning the German language. To that end, what matters when talking about the distinction between “wissen” and “kennen” is how the two verbs are used by German native speakers. The etymology and surrounding philosophy is absolutely irrelevant unless it helps with contemporary use of the vocabulary.
“So you can indeed have your own reality, but that doesn’t make it a true impression of what’s happening.”
Precisely! You can have your thoughts about the difference between “wissen” and “kennen”, but that doesn’t change the fact that they’re used in a different way.
I am not interested in discussing how words “should” be used. Who is to determine that anyway. Let people talk the way the want to talk. Why should anybody adhere to how the Ancient Greeks used a certain root.
The word “glamour” comes as a corruption of “grammar” which, to some 18th Century Scot, described magical persons, whose grammar in their spell-casting was just so. “Prestige” is from a Latin word meaning “illusionist, conjurer, juggler.” “Kennen” seems to mean “what I hear people saying about this”. Assuming a person has a good reason for doing something is respecting the person. Agency, we call that. Some of us call that. Thanks for the chat. Du weißt?
Very clear way to differentiate. Thank you!
Danke :)!!
Very helpful! Thank you!
Glad to hear that :)
I really like this type of article! You explain it really well and it somehow less intimidating since you explain it with a friendly way.
I’m happy to hear that :).
Danke für das schöne Feedback!
Spanish native speaker here. In all the examples you used, even the blurry ones, the correspondence “wissen”-“saber” and “kennen”-“conocer” is perfect
Wow, that’s crazy! I kind of suspect that Latin has something to do with that then :)
Emanuel, thanks so much for your delightful, insightful, and very helpful blog. I very much appreciate the fun and thoughtful analysis, and your painstaking care to include audio examples, translations, and practice quizzes. All of those are invaluable learning tools for me.
Your answer is literally correct in English, but perhaps you sensed it is stilted. In my US native-English speaking experience we’d more often say “I don’t remember the time of the appointment” — but to focus specifically on the past you pretty much have to do it as you’ve done.
Thanks for this :).
It’s a nice example for how English tends to prefer “thing”-words (nouns, -ing-gerunds) while German tends to prefer conjugated verbs.
Spoken German really tends to give every action its own little sentence.
In written German it’s less so, but still it’s not as noun dominated as English newspapers.
Just a small error in the quiz – I don’t know the cookie receipt any more. This should be recipe. A receipt is what the shop gives you as proof of purchase in case you want to return an item later. A false friend!
Fixed it, thanks :)
Hi Emanuel-
What about die Antwort? Does it sort of follow the same duality as die Loesung, meaning one can use either verb with it?
Your website is crazy awesome!!
Thanks
Nice one!!
You’re right, people do use it with both verbs.
However, “Antwort wissen” always sounds a tiny bit clumsy, to me anyway. A bit childish maybe. Not that I wouldn’t use it, but “Antwort kennen” is definitely more smooth.
Like… “Antwort wissen” is like a strawberry sorbet, “Antwort kennen” is like salty caramel ice cream.
Emanuel, your blog is a masterpiece!
You don’t know how much your blog has been helping me out during the process, and I’m sure this also applies to many others.
Thanks for the efforts and the work, and keep it up!
I’m really happy to hear that, danke :)!
Thanks! You are a genius!
I hadn’t thought of it, but I see now that it is the same with Hindi.
Equivalent of kennen: H. जानना (from Sanskrit ज्ञान, jñāna = knowledge)
Equivalent of wissen: H. पता, (from S. प्रत्यय, pratyaya = belief, conviction, faith, etc.)
Wow, that’s an unexpected parallel :)
Danke für den tollen Artikel. Endlich kenne ich den Unterricht zwischen “wissen” und “kennen”. Vorher wusste ich nicht genau, was der Unterschied war.
Freut mich, dass mein Artikel geholfen hat.
As a German I was never aware of this specific difference, the difference in talking comes from the habit and normalty of use.
But in the same way you still can (almost) tell both apart in the last section.
“kennen” = having made the experience with an *equal* (but not necessarily the *same* thing), (got to) know sthg. *from the past*.
“wissen” = to know something concrete from the current conversation or the current topic, to know the exact thing that is talked about. It also is said to signal that you got to know it just now or very recently or for affirmation to sound like a fact (“wissen” is used to indicate knowing the answer to a question, even if you would use “kennen” in other contexts) rather than “kennen” which would sound like a side note.
While you also can use “wissen” with “entities” (for a slightly different connotation), you never can use “kennen” respective to verbs, actions or phrases that contain an action, at least from my experience as native speaker and it would indeed sound strange. Beginners just could use “wissen” for everything which is better than using “kennen” for everything but it will have unwanted connotations in some cases.
The difference becomes significant if you think about the different meanings of these responses to someone else:
“I know.” (<- “wissen”, says that it’s nothing new to me.)
“I know it too.” (<- “kennen”, says that I already experienced something equal before which is not interchangeable with the previous response.)
And for the negation, “… nicht *mehr* kennen” more often means to have suppressed or erased memories (the past) of something/someone in one’s mind. It’s more negative and more actively than just “… nicht *mehr* wissen” which means to have forgotten something/someone. But colloquial language can also confound both sayings in specific moments to mean the same, which just is typical for colloquial language.
So “wissen” seems like a more strong and concrete version of “kennen”, although the difference in using them, as described on this site, is right (which I wasn’t even aware of before).