I've been studying Spanish for several years now, but I still continue to make frequent mistakes in gender agreement. I've gotten past the stage of being confused by "la mano" or "el tema" or "el agua," I understand that not all masculine nouns end in -o and not all feminine nouns end in -a.
The problem is that whenever I let my attention flag--if I am trying to get a verb tense right, for example--I make mistakes elsewhere in the sentence, particularly on gender agreement. And I mean the stupidest mistakes, like "las gatos" or "los montañas."
Does anyone have any specific suggestions on how to rewire an English-speaking brain so that the "language" parts of it truly believe that words really do have gender and that articles, adjectives, and nouns really need to agree? Do you know any specific exercises or drills to deal with this specific problem?
I found it extremely useful to always learn a noun together with the article or any other word indicating the grammatical gender.
So, e.g. the cat is le chat (masc.) in French and die Katze (fem.) in German. This is a typical case where learners mix up grammatical genders, but this only happens when they learn the wrong way at school i.e. remember cat=chat=Katze and remember the gender as a separate element. While speaking you just don't have enough time to check and doublecheck all this gender stuff and put the part together in a correct way. At least it will take you quite a long time. But when you learn it as a set, then in your head it is le chat / un chat resp. die Katze / eine Katze. Just accept chat to be a "le"-word and Katze to be a "die"-word and the gender question will not even pop up.
What can you do for languages which have gender but no article, like Russian or Hindi? In Russian you might add an adjective such as хороший/хорошая/хорошее and in Hindi you could use the kā or kī particles actually used for possessive but always indicating the right gender...
[edited for typos]
Actually, English speakers also find it strange to refer to an animal as 'it', particularly if it is a pet or a familiar farm animal. The gender of a pet will be known to its owner, and others will most likely assign it an arbitrary gender sooner than refer to it as 'it'.
'Him' or 'her', 'he' or 'she' personalises an animal, and most of us will do this if given a chance. Of course, less appealing, or less well-known creatures are also less likely to be accorded an honorary gender.
