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> German genders don't make sense - why is a table a strong, proud man, whereas a mangy, flea-infested feral tomcat a proper lady? This should be the least of

• MichaelCrawford 12y ago
  That's not what I'm told by native German speakers. They tell me that using the wrong gender makes me sound illiterate. However I readily agree that the emphasis placed on genders by American schoolteachers is misplaced. The problem is that I myself devoted far more effort to getting the genders right than to anything else. In four years of junior high and high school study, we were never once so much as requested to practice extended conversations, however we often had written tests that we would fail were we to provide the wrong genders in our solutions. The very first time in my life I ever had a conversation of any sort in German, was a ten minute chat with a German immigrant to the US, when he interviewed me for my MIT application.