weet (to know a fact) — Full Forms

English has one verb, know, doing two very different jobs: knowing a fact (I know that it's raining) and knowing a person or thing (I know Anna). Afrikaans, like most of its European relatives, splits these between two verbs — weet for facts and information, ken for acquaintance. This page gives you the full forms of weet, shows how it takes a dat-clause, and pins down exactly where the line falls between weet and ken. As a bonus, weet is also one of the rare verbs that preserves an old one-word past, wis — a small window onto the closed set of irregular survivors. For the side-by-side decision guide, see weet vs ken; for ken in full, see ken.

The core forms

Like every Afrikaans verb, weet does not change for person — ek weet, jy weet, hulle weet are all identical. What makes it mildly special is the past.

Notice the negation in the first and third examples: weet sits inside the nie ... nie bracket, with the closing nie at the very end of the clause. Ek weet nie on its own is the bare "I don't know," but the moment you add what you don't know, the second nie moves to the end: Ek weet nie waar my sleutels is nie.

weet + dat: stating what you know

The natural complement of weet is a dat-clause ("that ..."), reporting the fact known. After dat, the verb moves to the end of its clause — the standard subordinate-clause word order.

As in English, the dat can often be dropped in casual speech — Ek weet sy kom môre — but when dat is present, send the verb to the end. Weet also pairs happily with question words used as complements: weet wie (know who), weet waar (know where), weet hoekom (know why), weet of (know whether).

weet vs ken: the line that trips up English speakers

This is the distinction worth getting permanently right. Use weet for facts, information, and propositions — things you could express as "that ..." or as an answer to a question. Use ken for acquaintance: people you have met, places you have been, things you are familiar with, languages and skills you have.

That first sentence is the perfect test case: you ken the person (acquaintance) but you weet (or don't) a fact about her. English uses "know" for both halves; Afrikaans forces the split, and an English speaker's instinct to say ek weet haar is the classic error. A handy rule of thumb: if you could rephrase the English with "I know that ..." or "I know the answer / where / who," it is weet; if you mean "I'm acquainted with ...", it is ken. The full decision tree lives at weet vs ken.

wis: the archaic past you should recognise

Afrikaans dismantled its simple-past system, so almost every verb now forms its past with het + participle — and weet is no exception: the normal, modern past is het geweet. But weet belongs to the tiny closed set of verbs that once kept a true one-word preterite, and for weet that form is wis ("knew"). It is now archaic — you will meet it in older literature, the Bible, and elevated or deliberately old-fashioned prose, but it has effectively vanished from speech. Recognise it; do not reach for it.

Those two say much the same thing; the first is the antique wis, the second the everyday het geweet. The very existence of wis ties weet to the same closed irregular family that gave us the surviving past modals (kon, moes, wou) — historical leftovers of a tense the language otherwise abandoned. See the preterite overview for that whole set.

Common mistakes

Key takeaways

• weet is invariant in the present (ek/jy/hulle weet); the normal past is het geweet, the future sal weet.
• Its natural complement is a dat-clause (or a question word: weet waar / wie / of), and after dat the verb goes to the end of its clause.
• weet is for facts and information; ken is for acquaintance with people, places, and things — don't say ek weet haar.
• A reliable test: if you can rephrase with "I know that / the answer / where," use weet; if you mean "I'm acquainted with," use ken.
• weet keeps an archaic preterite wis ("knew"), now confined to literary and old texts — recognise it, but use het geweet in real life.