Beginners series 1
Beginners 36: Saber and Conocer
Learn the difference between these common verbs, which both translate as “to know”.
Rob
Inglés
Transcript
Welcome to another Spanish obsessed Beginners podcast. In this podcast, we teach you bite sized Spanish tidbits that will help you along your Spanish journey. This podcast is not a fully structured course, but more something you can dip in and out of. I'm Rob, and I'm one half of Spanish obsessed alongside Liz, who unfortunately won't be joining us in this episode. So you're stuck with me.
TranslationAnd speaking of fully structured courses, which this is not, we have just built one. It's called Foundations one, and it comes out on Friday, the 1st of September. That's this year, 2023. So it's most likely already out for you future listeners. Foundations one is an interactive video course where we take you from zero towards A2, Pre-intermediate, in a structured way, building a strong foundation in Spanish, which is why we called it Foundations. It's ideal for complete beginners. Or if you want to go back and rework some of the fundamentals which you feel you might have missed. Foundations 1 will be part of a series of courses which we'll call Foundations, which will form the backbone of how we teach Spanish at Spanish Obsessed. Foundations 1 will be or already is available for pro members. So if you're interested, head over to Spanishobsessed.com and click on the Go Pro button for more details or to find out more about this specific course it's Spanishobsessed.com/foundations-1 and I'll include a link in the show notes.
TranslationSo why are they difficult? Well, they're both irregular, like so many of the most common verbs in Spanish. But what's more difficult, though, is that they both mean to know, and this is the case for so many words in Spanish, where our simple English translation just doesn't tell the full story. So we're going to deep dive into each of these words. I'll give you a refresher of the conjugations, and then we'll talk about the uses or the meaning and how they differ. I'll give you some of my favourite phrases that I'd recommend memorizing, and we'll finish with a little quiz for you to practice using these verbs.
TranslationLet's start with saber. So in the present tense, all of the conjugations are regular except the yo form. And this is often the case for Spanish irregular verbs. For some reason it's always the yo form or usually the yo form that's most irregular. So in the case of saber, it's not yo sabo that just doesn't work, but it's yo sé, yo sé, two letters, S and an accented E, So that's an E with a little line above it. Yo sé, I know. And all of the remaining conjugations, those are normal. So that's tú sabes, el, ella, usted sabe, nosotros sabemos. And note the stress there sabemos, ustedes saben. And if you're in Spain, vosotros sabéis. So that's the present tense and I'm not going to run through all of the conjugations and all of the tenses because let's be honest, that would be very boring. But saber is also regular in the past tense, and we'll see that with one of the phrases that I teach you later on.
TranslationSo what does saber mean? Well, as I said, it translates as to know, and it means to know in terms of knowledge. I'm talking about knowing facts, figures and information. So it's kind of like, you know, when you ask someone, do you know what the square root of 64 is? It's eight. And the answer is either like, well, you do know or you don't know. It's yes or no. Or maybe another example. You could say, Do you know where Colombia is? And again, you either do or you don't know it. And it's it's like it's some information, some kind of shallow surface level information which you have stored in your brain. So you could think of it as like a shallow knowledge, which you can answer with a yes or a no. So let's take a couple of examples in Spanish.
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