From this lesson, it states that they are all interchangeable.
but i read from elsewhere such as spanishdict, it says el cual, el que etc have to be used after prepositions, and commas.
may i have a clearer explanation on when will we have to use the others, when do we have to use que only.
Hola Ashlyn
We're stating in the lesson that que. el cual, quien, are all relative pronouns meaning that/which.
The use of commas is indeed compulsery when using el cual, la cual, los cuales, las cuales, quien, quienes when there is an explicit referent in the sentence.
All our examples are using the comma with these.
There are two different types of relative clauses: defining and non-defining relative clauses, in Spanish "especificativas" and "explicativas". The ones we are using in this lesson are all explicativas and they need a comma. However, with especificativas, we don't use commas:
La niña que jugaba en el parque era muy alta.
The girl who played in the park was very tall.
This is where you can't use the other relative pronouns without the comma. To be able to use el cual, la cual, etc it would need a preposition. For example:
La niña con la cual jugaba mi hermano era muy alta.
The girl my brother was paying with was very tall.
As you can see, there is a lot of information about relative clauses. This information is not always reflected in our short lessons. We do have other articles (not lessons with testing) where we expand a lot more on grammatical concepts.
I hope it clarified it.
Saludos
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