'in dem' after 'der'? What?

Question

So I was watching this netflix series and the very first sentence goes like this: "Ein Typ, der im Internet Drogen verkauft". I think it means "A guy who sells drugs online". I'm very new to German and as I understand it "Der" is a masculine version of "The" in German, so how come in this sentence it precedes something that is not a noun? What I don't understand/know?

Answer 1

So in this case it's a relative pronoun. The 'der' is working as the 'who' in English. So the 'der' is used to restate or point to the 'Ein Typ' to further define him.

There is one other way to do this which is really weird and has a slightly different feeling to it:

"Ein im Internet Drogen verkaufender Typ"

But fundamentally, this is a different strategy. Where this rather literary structure makes a verb phrase into an awkward phrasal kind of adjective, the other is much more natural, since it keeps the verb phrase intact.

The thing you can learn from this: 'der/die/das' are definite articles, i.e. 'the', but also pronouns, like 'er/sie/es' but more like 'that one' or 'that'.

For example:

Die ist eine Spinne

"That [one] is a spider"

Dem geht's gut

"It's going well for that guy"

Der ist cool

"That guy is cool"

Answer 2

Your translation is correct.

However, 'der', 'die' und 'das' are an article ('the'). However the relative pronouns in German are identical to these. That is the case here, starting the relative clause, thus 'der' is here the translation of 'who' (in other context it could be of 'which' as well when referring to a thing).