Here’s a question for all Dopers who speak a non-English language that has nouns with genders: does the gender of a particular word ever trip you up? For example, are you ever uncertain of the article for a given word? Or have you ever found out after the fact that you had been using the wrong article? Also, do little kids make mistakes with their articles, or undereducated native speakers? I personally have lots of trouble with words I perfectly understand, but hear or use infrequently. In cases like that, the gender is just a guess. Does that ever happen for native speakers?
I assume you mean in the native language…
Yeah, it happens sometimes. I don’t speak or hear my native language all that often and I was ten when I started to learn/speak English and French because of relocating to Canada. Sometimes I have to think and actually try out the word in my head before speaking it to get the gender right. Sometimes, it sounds wrong no matter which way I say it. But it comes back if I spend any time among my fellow native language speakers (Russian). It seems it’s just a matter of practice and habit.
In my part of Spain there are two native languages. I only speak Spanish, the other one is Basque. The traditional but politically incorrect sentence used to indicate that someone sounds like they think in Basque uses the words “hen” (female) and “chicken” (male) with the adjectives in the wrong gender.
It trips me up when I’m trying to speak German, since many things have opposite genders in Spanish and German.
When I personalize something, I give it the gender it has in Spanish: to me Night is a woman, Sun a guy and Moon again a woman.
There is a special grammar case where, if you have a female word in the singular, you use the male article “el” ‘to avoid the cacophony’, i.e., to make it easier to pronounce. For example, you say “el águila” although Eagle is a female word, because “la águila” would be hard to say. When you talk about several male eagles you say “las águilas macho”, no “los águilas macho” or “los águilas”. I’ve heard people who are confused by this, mostly on TV, but it doesn’t happen to me, no.