It is doubly so if your native language is also a gendered one, but with different genders for common objects. It makes a mess in your head.

CZ: ten nůž (masc.) - DE: das Messer (neutr.) - EN: knife

CZ: ten svět (masc.) - DE: die Welt (fem.) - EN: world

CZ: ta žába (fem.) - DE: der Frosch (masc.) - EN: frog

Also, personified Death and rivers seem to be masculine-coded in Germanic languages, and feminine-coded in Slavic ones.

It also doesn't help when words in a single language that can refer to the same thing have different grammatical genders (e.g. месяц vs луна).

For extra spiciness, try the same word in all three genders, with different meanings in each one:

DE:

der Band ... volume (as in "the second volume in a collection of books")

die Band ... group (as in "the Beatles are a group")

das Band ... ribbon

To nobody's surprise ніж, світ, жаба have exactly right genders so it's Germans who are confused.

But, for some weird reason, modern Bulgarian mutated gender of "evening" to feminine:

Тази вечер

even though in the greeting "good evening", the old masculine form remains:

добър вечер

Bulgarian in general seems to be the Chad of the Slavic language family :)

Same in French. Le and la. (Masculine or feminine).

In Dutch: De and het, where de is for masculine and feminine, and het for ... I don't even know. And I'm a native Dutch speaker.

Edit: German also has cases: Nominative, accusative, dative and genitive, like Greek.

Latin had a 5th one.

How about up to seven cases and three genders in Slavic languages? That's the real struggle.

When in doubt use das like half the population of Berlin.

Can we get the other half to convert? Gendered articles are so annoying to remember, especially if you have to travel between German-speaking places that don't agree on all the noun genders. English speakers cannot be expected to understand this!

> Can we get the other half to convert? Gendered articles are so annoying to remember, especially if you have to travel between German-speaking places that don't agree on all the noun genders. English speakers cannot be expected to understand this!

That's what Dutch did. As spoken in most of the Netherlands, Dutch "eliminated" grammatical gender... which is to say it now has two grammatical genders: "both" ("de") and "neither" ("het").