> 1 - Don't get me started with German grammar, especially the way prepositions conjugate with the (arbitrary) gender of the noun, and the various types of prep

> 1 - Don't get me started with German grammar, especially the way prepositions conjugate with the (arbitrary) gender of the noun, and the various types of prepositions reuse the same conjugations. Just FYI, pretty much all Indo-European languages have gender-based noun declension. This is not special to German, it’s English that’s one of the few special ones that have lost it, no other European Indo-European language had. German, if anything, has rather simple scheme, where only the preposition declenses. Compare it with eg. Polish, which has 7 cases (compared to 4 in German), and declension is done on the suffix of the noun itself, which is itself pretty irregular, partly due to the fact that even within a gender, different noun types declense differently, eg. there are masculine personal, masculine animate and masculine inanimate nouns, and these three can be seen as subgenders. I simply don’t have an idea how any non-native speaker can have any hope to learn all of this other than through many years of practice.