As … As: כמו, כ־, באותה מידה

Saying two things are unequal needs יותר and מ־. Saying they are equal needs less machinery than English does, and that is exactly why it goes wrong. English builds a discontinuous frame — as … as, with the adjective wedged between them. Hebrew has one slot, after the adjective, and nothing in front:

There is no Hebrew word standing where the first as stands. The whole page follows from that.

כמו before a noun or a phrase

כמו kmo is the everyday equality marker and it takes whatever comes next unchanged — a noun, a name, a prepositional phrase.

The inflected forms, and why the vowel jumps

Before a pronoun, כמו cannot stay a free word — it absorbs the pronoun, exactly as every other Hebrew preposition does. The paradigm is the Academy of the Hebrew Language's, from נטיית מילות היחס (Wayback snapshot of 8 December 2025) and from its answer כמוך וכמותך (snapshot of 3 July 2025).

Six forms open with כָּ and four with כְּ, and the split is not arbitrary. The Academy states the condition in one clause: הכ״ף מנוקדת בקמץ כשהיא קרובה לטעם — the kaf takes a qamats when it stands close to the stress. In kamóni, kamóhu, kamónu the stress is on the מוֹ, one syllable along; in kemokhém and kemohém the ending pulls the stress a syllable further away, and the now-distant kaf reduces to shva. It is the ordinary Hebrew vowel-reduction pattern, the same force that turns גָּדוֹל into גְּדוֹלִים, doing its work on a preposition.

The Academy adds a fact worth having: many speakers say kamokhém and kamohém, keeping the qamats right across the paradigm, and the normative forms are the shva ones. Both are heard; nothing here is a mistake to be ashamed of.

There is a second, equally standard set built on כְּמוֹת, which Hebrew inherited from the Mishnah: כְּמוֹתִי, כְּמוֹתְךָ, כְּמוֹתוֹ, כְּמוֹתָם. The Academy's ruling is that כָּמוֹךָ and כְּמוֹתְךָ are both good — the first from the biblical layer, the second from the rabbinic one — and that modern Hebrew runs both systems at once. Pick either; do not mix them inside one sentence. The whole inflection, including the כ־ of similarity in its other jobs, is on כ and כמו.

Whole clauses take כמו ש־

If what follows is a clause with its own verb, כמו needs ש־ welded to it. This is compulsory: כמו cannot govern a finite verb on its own.

The bare כ־ is not "as … as"

A prefixed כ־ on a noun looks like a compressed כמו and usually is not. Its ordinary modern job is "in the capacity of" — a role, not a resemblance.

As a comparative, bare כ־ survives mainly frozen: כרגיל "as usual", כמובן "of course" (literally "as is understood"), כמנהגו "as is his custom" (formal). It also forms the biblical correlative pair — Hosea 4:9's וְהָיָה כָעָם כַּכֹּהֵן, "as the people, so the priest" — but in modern prose that shape is a quotation you recognise, not a pattern you build.

אותו: the same one

The inflected אותו / אותה / אותם / אותן, in front of a noun, means "the same" — which puts it squarely in this semantic field, since sameness is the limiting case of equality.

Now the point that trips up careful learners. The Academy answer את אותו (Wayback snapshot of 15 September 2025) addresses the apparent doubling head-on and clears it: in את אותו the two words have two different jobs — את marks the direct object, while אותו "marks identity here, and means the same". Its own summary of the structure is that את אותו מקום is built no differently from באותו מקום or לאותו מקום. Josef Klausner rejected the sequence; Yitzhak Avinery and Nisan Berggrün saw nothing wrong with it, and the Academy notes it is documented in rabbinic literature already — "ונמצא מזבל את אותו מקום" (Jerusalem Talmud, Shevi'it 3:5).

Standing on its own, אותו דבר is the everyday "the same thing" — זה אותו דבר, "it comes to the same".

From the same root come the two most useful equality expressions above the beginner level. באותה מידה is "to the same degree, equally", and לא פחות מ־ — literally "no less than" — is how Hebrew says every bit as … as, usually with a note of insistence.

The phantom first slot

Here is the error the whole page has been circling. Reaching for a word to fill English's first as, learners land on כל כך — and כל כך is a real Hebrew intensifier, so the sentence comes out grammatical and means something else.

Common Mistakes

1. Building the two-part frame. The most common shape of the error, and the reason it survives is that nobody corrects it — what comes out is fine Hebrew saying the wrong thing.

2. Leaving the pronoun standing after כמו. English keeps me a separate word after as, and the habit transfers whole. Hebrew prepositions absorb their pronoun.

3. Dropping the ש before a clause. כמו can head a noun, never a finite verb — the ש is what lets a whole clause in.

4. Freezing אותו as one word for "the same". It is an inflected form and it agrees with the noun it precedes, like everything else in the phrase.

Key Takeaways

• English's two-slot frame as … as has one slot in Hebrew, after the adjective: גבוה כמוני, טוב כמו בבית.
• Before a pronoun, כמו inflects: כָּמוֹנִי, כָּמוֹךָ, כָּמוֹהוּ, כָּמוֹנוּ, then כְּמוֹכֶם, כְּמוֹהֶם. The vowel drops because the stress has moved away — the Academy's own condition is that the kaf takes qamats when it is close to the stress.
• כְּמוֹתִי, כְּמוֹתוֹ is a second, equally standard set from Mishnaic Hebrew. Both systems are current.
• A clause takes כמו ש־, or כפי ש־ in formal writing. כמו alone cannot govern a verb.
• Bare כ־ before a noun usually means "in the capacity of" — הוא התחיל כשוליה. Its comparative use survives mainly in frozen items (כרגיל, כמובן).
• אותו / אותה + noun means "the same", and את אותו is correct — two different words doing two different jobs, per the Academy.
• Reinforcement goes after the adjective — גבוה בדיוק כמוני. Putting כל כך in front turns the comparison into an intensification.