Getting driven mad by the sense that although I usually know roughly when to use (o) qual and when to use que, I don’t really know why and I sometimes used to get pulled up by Dani on the Portuguese subreddit for getting it wrong, so I’m doing a data dump in a post to get it straight in my head. It’s going to be rambling. If you found this page on Google and you think I’m a teacher, LOL, go back to the search results, buddy, because I’m not that reliable.
The examples I’m thinking of are when que and qual are being used as “relative pronouns”. In other words, they are mostly dealing with situations where in English you would use “which”, when taking about a person or thing. “The parlous state to which American democracy has sunk”, “enjoy the tax breaks for which you have traded your freedom”. That kind of thing
There are other uses of qual (“Qual é a dúvida” for example) and lots of other uses of que (“o que é que é?”) but they are easier to deal with so I won’t be going into those. Nor do I have any trouble with words like quem, onde and cujo, which sometimes to the same job in English but only when dealing with people (quem =who), places (onde =where) or ownership by people (cujo=whose).
Está bem, vamos meter as mãos na massa. Começo com as notas no livro Qual é a Dúvida
Que
Used after monosyllabic prepositions – em que a que, com que, de que, por que. So “in which”, “to which”, etc
Qual
Used after other prepositions “para o qual”, “sobre o qual” (“for which”, “about which”). So far so good. It is “partitive” in other words, it singles something(s) out for discussion from among a larger group.
Here’s an example of o qual from…. Um… Somewhere:
“O lavrador sobre o qual falei” O qual is a relative pronoun here. The speaker has mentioned a ploughman earlier and he wants to refer to him again so he says “The ploughman about which (sobre o qual) I spoke…” The relative pronoun is a way of singling him out without having to do all the work of reintroducing him in the story.
So, relative pronouns usually come after prepositions but be careful, because there are some things that look like relative pronouns but aren’t. For example:
“Confuso sobre qual palavra usar“. Qual seems like a relative pronoun here but it’s not. He is wondering “qual palavra usar?” and he’s confused about that, and the qual ends up being after sobre, but it isn’t doing the same job. In English it’s the difference between “I’m confused about which word to use” and “Ah, so this is the new Fado about which the critics are losing their shit”.
O qual differs from que in these situations because it always has an article (‘o’) tacked on, which means it’s going to change with the gender and number of the thing it’s referring to, so it could be “a qual” or “as quais” or whatever, whereas que is always que.
Hm, ok, we’ll, moving on, let’s see if we can find anyone else with some light to shed.
This Ciberdúvidas page discusses em que and no qual as substitutes for onde in a sentence. So you might choose to say “the University in which I studied” instead of “the University where I studied”. The correspondent reckons it comes down to what sounds best.
This (Brazilian) teacher advises that o qual is mainly useful for avoiding constantly repeating the word “que” every five seconds. Que is a very overused word in Portuguese and there might be situations where you’ve used it so often in a sentence that using it again is going to confuse things, perhaps…?
This page for school-age children focuses specifically on “no qual” but doesn’t shed much light except to show examples of cases where o qual is basically synonymous with que, and you can check whether you are using it correctly by substituting “que” and seeing if the sentence works.
So is that it then? At bottom, it’s not really a grammar rule as such, just a question of what sounds gooder?
I poked around some more because I couldn’t quite believe it. This Ciberdúvidas page gives a few situations where it’s important to use one or the other, and I thought maybe he would be more rulesy, but, on closer inspection, he was just ruling out some of the other uses of qual and que discussed above:
O rapaz que tinha medo do escuro venceu os seus obstáculos
O qual wouldn’t fit here, but that’s because it isn’t really acting as a relative pronoun anyway. It’s a determiner I think. In English we would use “that” or “who” instead of “which”
And he goes on to talk about prepositions of one syllable…
‘A verdade é um postigo/ A que ninguém vem falar.’ (Pessoa)
Versus prepositions with two…
‘Tinha vindo para se libertar do abismo sobre o qual sua negra alma vivia debruçada.’ (Torga)
And that’s really just a question of which sounds better, again.
Well, that was a bit of an anticlimax. I thought it would be more complicated than this, but that’s OK. I feel a bit more confident in using them after this deep dive.
Luso 