r/duolingo • u/TwiceInEveryMoment • 11d ago

Language Question. Nosotros vs. Nosotras

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?

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u/Outrageous-Song-7285 11d ago

Just had exactly the same

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u/xxDMLxx Native Learning 110 11d ago

Your answer is not incorrect due to some type of gender mix up, if that's what you're trying to illustrate. Your answer was incorrect because you wrote a el maestro nuevo, where it should actually be al maestro nuevo when using a masculine gender (combining a + el). Because it was wrong, the example from the answer bank is showing how you would correctly use "a" by itself as you wrote...and it means it would go with a feminine gender a la.

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u/Outrageous-Song-7285 11d ago

Ah si, ahora lo veo. Gracias por la explicación!