can/how u understand male/female/neutre for nouns?

« So what are your thoughts about this issue in general? for English speakers, is it a difficult concept to understand? »

I've never found it difficult to understand, because I don't really think that there's really anything to 'understand'. One just has to learn it. Even though English is my native language, most of the time I just 'know' the gender of words in French now.

Eventually you just go with what feels natural, its something you just have to pick up really.

<<I don't know, mate. I don't really think there's no additional meaning. I guess it just tells you if the performer is male or female.>>

You don't need grammatical gender for that. All you need is separate words for males and females, e.g. actor/actress, waiter/waitress, and chairman/chairwoman. I think that even that is an unnecessary feature for a language to have though, because it makes it more sexist.

>>I don't know, mate. I don't really think there's no additional meaning. I guess it just tells you if the performer is male or female.<<

That's fine for distinguishing the sexes of performers. But it serves no such purpose for neutral nouns like table, chair, sky, idea, memory.

While English nouns no longer retain gender, there are some remnants. I think it's reasonably well known that boats and cars can be referred to as 'she'. Another one I haven't seen mentioned on this forum is 'nature', which is often followed by the pronoun 'she'. This is probably to do with the fact that we often say 'Mother Nature', but even when we just say 'nature', she is often used i.e. Nature gives, and she takes away.

And I think the idea that things can be masculine or feminine does persist in English, so that occasionally someone will refer to an object or concept as he or she. I once heard someone on TV talking about basketball, and when talking about shooting the ball, said something about getting 'him' in the net. Also Madonna's song 'Live to tell' contains the lines 'I know where beauty lives, I've seen it once, I know the warm she gives'. She obviously couldn't quite make up her mind on that one lol

Yes, gender can be used for genderless objects in English, but doing so implies personification of the object. Calling a car "she" implies affection for the car, as well. It is not simply the normal pronoun to refer to a car with.

so maybe now u can guess that hAving genre for nouns isn't quite useless...like somebody was saying above... ;)

You always talk about ''genre'' but you mean (grammatical) gender. This is often confused with the notion of ''sex'' as done in one of the last posts. Yes, if there is gender available in a language, you usually use it do distinguage the sex of the actor. (By the way, does the word ''actor'' imply a gender?) This leads to the reverse conclusion that the gender of other words ''imply'' the sex of the referred noun, even it if doesn't have a natural sex.

>>I don't know, mate. I don't really think there's no additional meaning. I guess it just tells you if the performer is male or female.<<

That depends on what you mean by meaning. It makes it possible to add affection (positive or negative) to your utterance. But there's another advantage: You need not repeat the word your refer to if it can be referred to by a pronoun. With only it as pronoun, you can only refer to one word unless you don't have another context. If there're male and female pronouns just for humans and animals, so, besides showing affection, you can only refer to one male, one female being and one neuter thing in one context. If things have gender, and if you're talking about other things than humans and animals, you can refer to that words
with at most three pronouns, each of them ''pointing'' to another word. So your texts become more sophisticated, more fluently and a little shorter of course. (Assuming that pronouns are shorter than the words they point to.) It's boring when you read a text where one and the same word, especially if it's a longer one, is constantly repeated. By the way, there are languages extending the concept of grammatical gender to a wider range: African languages show up many above ten so called classes.

Although English doesn't have gender, English speakers in a way apply the same concept when they remember people's names. If I hear the name Sarah I know it is a girl's name, so in a way I recognise this word as feminine. If I hear the name Mark, I recognise it as masculine.

I think the use of the words 'gender', 'masculine', and 'feminine' is unfortunate, because they really have little to do with physical sex/gender. They are simply classes of nouns (and adjective, pronouns, etc.) that agree with themselves, and are often based on a particular sound pattern (the ending in Indo-European languages, the beginning in Bantu ones). They are useful, as explained above, in resoving ambiguity when multiple pronouns are used. The fact that most physically masculine things fall into one category, while most physically feminine ones fall into another is really just coincidental.

If you really need to understand how, first you have to use the words and then the finger...