The successful recognition of cognates is the most important precondition for intercomprehension. Our study examines on which basis speakers of German recognize Germanic cognates and which factors other than similarity play a role in this process. According to our data the recognition of words depends primarily on a spontaneous sense of similarity, which in most cases is a good precondition for word recognition; however, it turned out that other types of associations are involved, too, which poses a challenge for didactic approaches to intercomprehension.