Spanish · Chapter 14 · Lesson 8 · Grammar primer
Relative pronouns advanced
Prescribed by the AQA specification.
The short version
Cuyo agrees with the thing owned
Cuyo means 'whose' and behaves like a possessive adjective, so it matches the thing possessed and ignores the owner entirely. In el autor cuyas novelas leo, cuyas is feminine plural because novelas is, even though the author is a man. It is the single biggest cuyo error, and getting the agreement right marks you out.
El autor cuyas novelas leo es español.
A whole idea needs lo cual, not que
When you are commenting on an entire situation rather than a named noun, que will not carry it. Llegó tarde, que me molestó is wrong: the genderless antecedent needs the neuter lo cual or lo que. The same applies when there is no noun in sight at all, as in no entiendo lo que dijiste.
Llegó tarde, lo cual me molestó.
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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22-question session
One question at a time, mixed across the exercises in this lesson. Miss one and it comes back round before the end.
Lesson 8 of 13 in this chapter