Preface: all the points here are referring to a native english speaker’s perspective.
Having to learn many, MANY different endings for nouns, plurals, and adjectives based on a completely arbitrary (and in the case of german totally random) gender assignment is ridiculous. It’s one of the any reasons I actually think that languages like Japanese and Chinese are in many ways EASIER than euro languages; they don’t bother with genders at all. In the case of mandarin, they don’t even have verb conjugations! They seem to communicate just fine without it. In english and arabic we have ONE definite article, “the” and “al” respectively, and that’s it.
I know with Japanese all the verb conjugations are completely based on the function of the verb in the sentence and all but 2 verbs in the whole language are irregular.
My german friends have said that they just seem to know what the gender of every noun is, they just do, and same with cases. It just “feels right” to them. Meanwhile I seem to get every possible declination wrong in conversation no matter how much I try to study the rules withd flash cards to remember all the correct genders. it just goes away whenever I try to talk. It just feels completely arbitrary to me.
I completely admit to being lingo-centric: the slavic, germanic, roman, and Uralic speaking countries of Europe seem to have no problem mastering these languages. As much I would wish it, I won’t be able to convince 100 million german speakers to modify their language to make it easier for me. I’ll just have to deal with it.
So my question is: Why? where did they come from and what’s the point? Why is a bakery “female” and a book “neutral”? If I’m not mistaken; English used to be a part of this but the genders somehow went away over the centuries.