from my experience, gramatical gender is always more difficult than no gener, even when you have a native tongue that employs a grammatical gender. In romance l

from my experience, gramatical gender is always more difficult than no gener, even when you have a native tongue that employs a grammatical gender. In romance langauges, the moon is feminine ("la lune"), in german it is masculine ("der mond"), so for both french and german speakers learning english ("a moon") should be easier, because it does not require learning an additional bit or two of information. I would argue that dictionary size does not matter for basic language skills, but becomes more important the closer you get to native proficiency.