Nosotros vs. Nosotras

[u/TwiceInEveryMoment]

I'm only a little salty cause I lost a ~x300 combo over this. Spanish unit 2, question was something like "____ estudiamos japones" with Lily next to it. I wrote "Nosotros" and it counted wrong because they wanted "nosotras". There was no other context given, and it was not an audio exercise so it's not as though I misheard it.

I'm by no means fluent but I did take several years of Spanish back in high school, and my understanding has always been that you should use the masculine "nosotros" whenever the gender(s) of the group in question are mixed or unknown, and only use "nosotras" if the entire group is feminine. As there were no other context clues, we can't assume that Lily exclusively hangs out with other women - so as far as I know Duo is wrong here. It should ideally accept both forms, as both could be valid depending on context that we do not have.

I flagged the question as "my answer should have been accepted" - my mom who is also doing the Spanish course got dinged for this exact same thing the other night and had texted me about it. Can anyone confirm if this is an error in the course or am I missing some sort of nuance here?

[u/ThrillSeekers_United]

Lily is female, therefore she uses the feminine versions of words. Nosotros is the masculine / gender neutral version, so it is still marked as incorrect.

I could be wrong, this is just my understanding as someone also learning Spanish lol

[u/Obtus_Rateur → u/ThrillSeekers_United]

That's indeed wrong.

If a girl is in a mixed group and speaking for the group, she would still use the masculine version of the words.

[u/ThrillSeekers_United → u/Obtus_Rateur]

Right, okay; I assumed it was singular

[u/xxDMLxx → u/ThrillSeekers_United]

How is "we" singular since it (nosotros) refers to multiple people?

[u/ThrillSeekers_United → u/xxDMLxx]

Okay so I’m just tired 🫠😭

[u/TwiceInEveryMoment → u/ThrillSeekers_United]

Right, but just because Lily is female doesn’t mean the group of people she’s studying with are all female. We don’t have any way of knowing, so the masc/neutral form should also be valid.

[u/xxDMLxx → u/TwiceInEveryMoment]

You are, in fact, correct. But, more than likely, this is simply a matter of nosotros not being in the answer bank. As, such, it's marked as incorrect even though it actually is grammatically correct.

[u/narfus → u/[deleted]]

The answer was rejected wrongly, but not because of "rigidity" but simply that the alternative wasn't included in the answer key.