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Message: <blockquote data-quote="tarchon" data-source="post: 832812" data-attributes="member: 5990">Because you're only dealing with simple utterances.  The primary function of gender (and number) is to sort out references in the sentence, so it doesn't come up much on a basic level (plus English speakers speaking German intentionally avoid using it since they're uncomfortable with it, same as with modals and subjunctives).  English of course has gender as well, and it serves the same purpose.  The main difference is that we associate gender with the meaning of the noun rather than the form of the noun.Consider the sentence:"I saw him giving it to her."If you knew the context of this sentence, it would be perfectly clear what it meant because the pronoun genders identify who/what they refer to.  If your pronoun was the invariant "ta,""I saw ta giving ta to ta" would be a little vague even if you knew the context.The system used in German isn't the best example since it's a little fossilized, but the formal gender of nouns does still function to clarify references to some extent.  I've certainly run into cases where I caused confusion by muddling gender. This is the function of the person, animation, gender, noun class, number, speaker distance, and social level that various languages base their agreement features on, and given the widespread use of agreement features, we have to conclude that some form of it must be indispensible.</blockquote>