[rubberpoliceman]

> Having to think ahead to "okay what's the gender of the noun I'm gonna use three words from now.

Now, that's interesting. I'm a native speaker of German, and just the other day I realized that one of the mistakes I keep making in English is to make the "a/an" distinction not based on phonetics, but on agreement with the noun, disregarding any words preceding it: I know that it's "an error", not "a error"; but then I also tend to say (or write) "an common error".