Esperanto · Chapter 6 · Lesson 14 · Grammar primer
Subordinate clauses: ke, kiu, kiam
How to say that something happened, which thing you mean, and when it took place - the three clause types that turn simple sentences into real prose.
The short version
kiu takes -j from outside and -n from inside
This is the one to drill. A relative pronoun takes its plural from the noun it refers back to, but its accusative from the job it does inside its own clause, and the main clause has no say at all. La viro, kiun mi vidis, estas mia frato: kiun has -n because mi vidis lands on it, even though the man is the subject of the sentence. Kies means whose and never changes.
La viro, kiun mi vidis, estas mia frato.
ke is never dropped, and kiam tells the truth about tense
English quietly deletes that in I know you are coming. Esperanto never does, because free word order means nothing else marks where the inner clause starts: mi scias, ke vi venos. For a yes-or-no question inside a sentence you need ĉu, never se. And a kiam-clause uses the tense that is actually true, so where English switches to the present for a future event, Esperanto keeps the future.
Kiam li venos, mi diros al li.
That's the gist. The full article goes deeper - more examples, the edge cases, the why - and the practice below scores like a vocabulary session and earns the same XP.
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