Know you. Know of you. Know about you.

All right… hello and welcome to the Gold Forest English podcast Season Two - I guess we can call it.
Today I'm going to talk to you about a vocabulary point… but before we get to that I'll introduce myself. My name is Jordan. I'm the director of Gold Forest English Academy and I'm gonna talk to you today about a vocabulary point that was brought up to me recently.
Some students asked me about this word and the variations of it, and that word is know - K N O W is the spelling - know, as in ‘I know him’, ‘I know her’, and there are some small differences in the use of this word. So let's talk about it.

So the first and most basic use of this word is to say a sentence like I just did. I know him I know her. If we know a person, it's this personal connection. We we have met with them or talked with them. We have a…we have interacted with them. There is a personal connection between them. So… I know many people here in Japan. I have met people and exchanged names and had conversations. So I can say that I know many people in Japan.

Something that we can do to make this a little bit different is to say I know of her. To know of with O F the preposition. If we know of someone, it means that we know that they exist. We are aware of their existence. Maybe, um we well, probably we haven't met them. They don't know us in person. We've never met them. but you know that they are a person. They are alive or perhaps they are dead, but you know that they are a real person. So I could say, I know of William Shakespeare. I never met William Shakespeare, the famous author, the famous writer, but I am aware that he was a person and I know things about his life or his work and even though we have never met, because now it's a long time in the past, he is dead, I can say that I know of him.
I know of Barak Obama, the ex-president of the United States. I know that he is a real person and I've never met him, but I know he exists, so we can use know of to mean understanding that people exist.

Our second variation is know about - know about with A B O U T. If you know about someone, it's that we know some facts, some information. We know data, we can understand some data and information about this person. so you might know some details about a person's life, maybe a celebrity or some kind of famous person or idol that you really like and you know some information about their life. So… knowing about somebody…. maybe you are um… friends with them or maybe you're not friends with them. Maybe you've never met them, but you know some information. You can understand some facts and data about their lives, so we use know about to talk about this to- uh discuss this information that we have about other people.

So these are our three main uses of the verb know:
|I know her, she is my friend.
I know of him. He's a famous writer. He's a famous actor. I know that he is real, but I've never met him.
I know about them. They are a group of people and I have some data, some information about them. I know about them.

So these are three different uses of the word know. I know, I know of, and I know about.

I will be posting a short blog post on the website, which gives more example sentences and more details about this language. So be sure to check out the blog post on the website - on GoldForestAcademy.com And I'll also be posting a small infographic image to the Instagram, which is @GoldForestAcademy.

All right. Well, thank you very much for listening to episode one of season two -I guess. Thank you very much. I hope you enjoy the rest of your day. Take care. Goodbye.