[handrous]

> - French conjugation of verbs is a whole world of its own

> - Nouns are non-gendered in English, and gendered in most European languages. Yes, a ship is a she, and referring to people or animals you use he/she etc. but in Polish and French, every word has a hidden, often undeducible gender you just have to know. Can't remember if German has rules for noun gender.

French conjugation isn't as bad as its reputation suggests. Gender's what dissuaded me from trying to keep up with it, after getting pretty damn good in four fairly-rigorous semesters of French study in college. I never got a feel for guessing gender, because there are lots of rules and way too many exceptions to them. For that and other reasons it ends up being hard to drill French nouns out of context—and actually, drilling adjectives out of context isn't all that useful either, for similar reasons. You kinda have to study the whole thing at once to really internalize all the transformations words undergo due to gender, so using them correctly becomes quick & natural. So much for simple Anki decks and reclaiming otherwise-lost time to work on vocab.

Spanish is so much easier. I barely paid attention for a couple semesters of very half-assed Spanish instruction in high school, but I bet I could correctly guess noun gender in Spanish at a much higher rate than I could French nouns, which language I studied both more recently and probably got ~100x as good at as I ever was with Spanish.