Connaître — to know | French Verb Chart

🇬🇧 Connaître in plain English: knowing people and places

Connaître is the OTHER “to know” — familiarity with people, places and works — and its conjugation carries French’s politest irregularity: a circumflex that appears only before t. Je connais, tu connais, but il connaît — the hat lands wherever the old s once lived (2016 spelling reform makes it optional; every French speaker still writes it). Plural: nous connaissons, vous connaissez, ils connaissent — the -aiss- stem that also builds the imparfait (je connaissais) and subjonctif (que je connaisse). Futur je connaîtrai, and the passé composé j’ai connu shifts meaning the same way savoir’s does: « j’ai connu Marie à Lyon » = I MET Marie in Lyon — the moment familiarity began, not the state of it.

The choosing rule, since the two knows confuse every learner: connaître takes a NOUN, always and only — je connais Paris, je connais cette chanson; it can never introduce a clause. Savoir takes facts and clauses — je sais qu’il vient. If “know” is followed by a person or place, connaître wins without exception. The family shares the full pattern: reconnaître (recognise — je reconnais, j’ai reconnu), paraître (seem), apparaître, disparaître (il a disparu). One stem system, the whole appearance-and-acquaintance wing of the language — and one of the rare irregular tables where the spelling rule (circumflex before t) does the memorising for you.