French · Chapter 5 · Lesson 3 · Grammar primer
Relative pronouns
Prescribed by the AQA specification.
The short version
Qui or que is decided by what follows
The split is grammatical, not people against things: both can refer to either. If a verb follows directly, use qui. If a subject follows, use que, as in le livre que je lis, where je is the subject. And unlike English, French can never drop the relative: le livre je lis is broken.
Le livre que je lis est facile.
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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Lesson 3 of 15 in this chapter