German · Chapter 9 · Lesson 7 · Grammar primer
Relative pronouns
Prescribed by the AQA specification.
The short version
The relative pronoun's case comes from its clause
German takes the gender of a relative pronoun from the noun, but the case from the pronoun's job inside its own clause. The man is the subject of the main sentence below, yet inside the relative clause he is the thing I see, so the pronoun is accusative. Cover the main clause with your thumb and ask what the pronoun is doing.
Der Mann, den ich sehe, ist mein Vater.
German never drops the relative pronoun
English says the book I am reading and leaves out that. German cannot: the comma and the relative pronoun are compulsory every time, and the verb goes to the end of the clause. It is the word English speakers forget most, because English never made them say it.
Das ist das Buch, das ich lese.
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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10-question session
One question at a time, mixed across the exercises in this lesson. Miss one and it comes back round before the end. There are 13 in all: practise more afterwards if you want them.
Lesson 7 of 17 in this chapter