Hello everyone!
I’m really curious to know if there’s a reason or nuance that makes this answer impossible.
On なら grammar page it says that it is conditional and it can be used with verbs, so why my answer is not accepted?
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I would say that it could be used interchangeably with できなければ, but it depends on context/relationship between sender/recipient. In this case maybe なければ is more formal and indirect/speculative and used to be more polite in such a situation. I may be wrong so please correct me 
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I’m not 100% sure conditionals are strange in any language.
If it were to guess based on my understanding is had to do with the fact that なら has the feeling or nuance of a situation or circumstance, whereas ば has more of the nuance of a hypothetical possible future.
Maybe that helps, maybe that’s more confusing.
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Have we got any definitive guide to conditionals? I’m trying to understand the differences for my N4
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We’re actually planning on rewriting the なら description a little bit in the near future, as we’re not so happy with the way a lot of sources (including us) teach it right now. Realistically, it is far closer to ‘were’ in English than it is to ‘if’.
This is both in a literal and grammatical sense, as なら is a conjugation of だ in the same way that ‘were’ is a conjugation of ‘is’ in English.
This is why なら is almost never used when talking about results that are determined, or things that happened in the past.
For example in English if you said
‘Were it to become summer when I was young, I went to the beach’.
This sounds really weird because it’s already all the past. We would say ‘when it was summer’, or ‘If it was summer’ in English.
The same is true for things that have a predetermined result.
‘Were I go to the gym, I will become strong’
Strange, right? Because we assume that (B) is already true. In this case you would need to make the second half of the sentence conditional, or at least uncertain as well, like this.
‘Were I to go to the gym, then I would probably become strong’.
The same applies to Japanese with なら. If the 2nd half of the sentence is a determined result, it sounds strange.
Addendum - This way of thinking about なら doesn’t work 100% of the time, but it’s far closer than ‘if’ in my mind.
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Oops! I just noticed that I forgot to post the link to the video where I got that chart from. IMO, his is the best explanation of the Japanese N4 conditionals (there’s more, lol) that I have found thus far:
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I need a flowchart…
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Nah that is right. I don’t care
The japanese people are wrong this time.
We are right boys.
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Can someone confirm that this is really a wrong answer and not an oversight? I’m having trouble seeing what the problem is.
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The only oversight here that we could argue is that they did not get an orange hint pointing from なら to ば, instead their answer was treated as a mistake straightaway. We have to remember that this is an SRS app and the sentence in question belongs to ば. And as mentioned by Asher some work towards demystyfing なら is underway and I don’t know how would a hint like that fit in with the rewritten なら page, although I doubt it would be harmful to anyone. Anyway my point is two different answers cannot be correct here and if the answer is ambiguous then some different work is needed.
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Plenty of bunpro grammar points will accept a variety of conditionals though. But I agree that in this instance if the point is meant to specifically drill ~ば then it may be a better idea to just soft-fail with an explicit message.
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You sure they accept different grammar points like in this case though? That’s what I meant by two different answers.
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I don’t remember precisely but I remember that in the somewhat similar case of the many “must” constructions there’s quite a lot of leeway in the accepted answers.
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Those also have particular situations where you’d use them. For example, なければいけない is used for things that must be done by an individual, while なければならない is used for situations that apply to several people, such as rules and laws. だめ is just an informal version of saying “must” in Japanese.
Then you have ベキ and はず, but those are more like “should” in English, so they are different from “must”, and they have a different function from each other as well. For instance, べき is more of a proper “should”, as in:
今宿題をするべき = “You should do your homework now.”
And はず is more like:
今日は学校にいるはずだ。= “He/She should be in school today.”
In English we have a multipurpose usage of “should”, but that’s not the case in Japanese. Same thing with “must”. IOW, they’re different.
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As far as I am aware all of this leeway belongs to a single grammar point. It’s just variations of the same structure differing in formality for example. Not two different structures accepted as an answer to an exercise belonging only to one of them. It would kinda defeat the point of an SRS I think.
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There I found an example:
This is drilling てはいけない but I can answer てはならない and it’s accepted as "alternate grammar’, even though it’s a separate point.
Also I just noticed that the いく version is N5 while the なる one is N2, so if you follow bunpro order by the time you reach the latter you’ve probably mastered the former.
But overall I agree with you and @Jose7822, in general in these cases I think it would make more sense to “soft fail” and ask for a different answer I think.
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You have to consider that this is a sentence without context, so BunPro is just allowing various interpretations. Given that this could be a rule at that location, which is frequently the case in certain areas of temples in Japan for example, ならない could be one of the ways you could interpret this sentence.
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I’m not arguing that it’s incorrect, I’m just saying that within the bunpro SRS meta-game it’s not the point that’s supposed to be studied.
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