Learn Spanish (Latin America): La casa donde vivo es pequeña.

While que means 'that' or 'which', donde means 'where'. Because la casa is a place, we use donde to link the clauses, just like in English. You could technically use the lesson's word and say la casa en que vivo (the house in which I live), but using donde is much more common and sounds more natural here.

Why doesn't donde have an accent mark?

In Spanish, question words always get an accent mark, like in ¿Dónde vives? (Where do you live?). But when donde is just being used to link parts of a sentence rather than ask a question, it drops the accent.

I learned that we use estar for places. Why does this sentence use es (from ser)?

It is true that we use estar to talk about a place's location (like La casa está en la ciudad). However, here we are not talking about location; we are describing a physical characteristic of the house—its size (pequeña). For basic descriptions and traits, we always use ser.

The word pequeña matches casa, but they are separated by the donde vivo part. Is that normal?