It doesn&#x27;t matter whether it&#x27;s related to biological gender[1]; the fact remains that these languages force you to remember extra information that serves no semantic purpose, which causes the same problem as English does&#x2F;did when forcing you to pick a gender for the pronoun of a generic person.<p>Whether you call it &quot;grammatical gender&quot; or &quot;gender&quot; or &quot;noun class&quot; is irrelevant; it all burns down the same cigarette butt.<p>[1] Although it pretty clearly is, since languages consistently lump in the female version of a human noun (cartera) with the grammatical gender of woman, and male (cartero) with man; the little-girl exception you mention from German is because that diminutive suffix (-chen in Mädchen) takes the neuter case with higher priority. The (fact that this is such a predictable, rare) exception proves the (general validity of the) rule.