>>27620
>I'm talking about when genders are applied to inanimate objects. I've heard this is particularly confusing in Germany

In Russian it is also prevalent - every word has a gender, it does not matter if it is inanimate object or not. There are three of them, masculine, feminine or neutral, and gender of the word is determined mostly by word ending and different subtle rules. Some object have two words with both genders, like koshka and kot (кошка, кот, cat), but most of them are single-worded.

Often you can often detect native Russian speaker, because he uses "it" in English less and uses gendered "he" and "she" even for simple objects.

There is no problem with this rule, I is pretty easy if you know language. Some exception exists, like popular controversy about coffee (кофе) - it was masculine in past (кофей), but sounds and written like grammatical neutral nowadays. Both usages are correct, but snobs and aesthetes may be angry when you are using neutral instead of masculine.

And, of course different kind of local feminists and other lefties are mad about all this gendered thing but who cares.