I don't think you're wrong, but my experience has some nuanced differences maybe. I have known plenty of German speakers, including natives and often myself, w

I don't think you're wrong, but my experience has some nuanced differences maybe. I have known plenty of German speakers, including natives and often myself, who make case/gender mistakes with no real impact on comprehension. There certainly can be some ambiguity, but context and word order can often mitigate that, no? I feel like if you used "die" for everything and just a neuter nominative case, I could still figure most things out. My experience is that many German speakers (especially when speaking a dialect) just mush articles and suffixes together and it's not entirely clear that they use specific genders and cases most of the time anyway. For example, my relatives near Frankfurt pretty much say "d- Milch", "d- Hund", "d- Mauer", etc. SOMETIMES, you can hear a bit of an "s" when it's supposed to be das, des. YMMV of course. I don't really find German to be less forgiving of mistakes than English or the handful of other languages I've studied. At least, this what I take away from your comment about compile errors. Maybe -Wcase or -Wgender is a closer analogy? Anyway, I like your analogy overall. :)