Any Spanish teacher will have acronyms and approaches for tricky topics like ser/estar, ver/parecer and saber/conocer. The duality of being, seeing and knowing can confuse beginners and catch intermediates when they let their guard down. I’ve done this for 25 years and I’m still learning new ways to present and practice.

Today was a good day on both counts.

I added to my catalog of HTML games, spinning up 300 sentences to practice to add to this growing list of games. Purposefully repetitive in nature, the game is intended to have students focus on use, not forms. We worked through some sentences, using the emojis as anchors: 🧠 = saber = to know facts, dates, how to do something, 💗 = conocer = to know people and places… and faces. Obviously, this is a limited view, but one I hope makes things clear. I also hope that the scale and the immediate feedback helps.

The real breakthrough today was the CON. What does that mean? CONocer links to CONnections to people with whom, CON quienes, we relate. Ditto for places, though the trick doesn’t work as well. My students really seemed to latch onto the conexión (conocer) vs. información (saber) back-and-forth. I was there for it because they seemed to be building and describing their understanding simultaneously.

Another way to conceptualize CONocer is to think of CONtacts on a phone. These are people, primarily, but also restaurants, museums and other cultural institutions. Conversely, one would not list speaking French or knitting or who won the World Cup in 1950 as a phone contact. These, therefore, are expressed with saber. Understandably one could not put a neighborhood of a whole city as a phone contact–these are conocer–however the visual helps.

Will this revolutionize the way we present these essential verbs? I suspect not, but, you know what..?

¿Sabe usted qué…?

Pablo _____ tocar la guitarra.

This is a tough one in translation, and it even test my sabe = 🧠 = facts, conoce = 💗 = faces trick. The correct answer is “sabe,” as knowing how to do something is expressed with saber. What if you love to play? What if you play from your heart? What is I feel a connection to my instrument?

Don’t complicate or over think it, as I tell my students. No matter what, this notion of knowing is a saber one.