German word order very different from English is. :-)
And don’t even let me get started on my rant about assigning a gender to nouns. Too late...here goes: Masculine, Feminine, Neuter. What is this European obsession with sex anyway? The French and Germans can’t even agree upon the gender of the moon [la lune vs. der Mond). Who assigned such rules anyway? No wonder they have so many wars. /rant
Heh. When I was a young-skull-full-of-mush learning French in Quebec, the noun genders were a real Pelosi. It was interesting to find that my French-Canadian buddies didn't know the genders, either.
When I'd ask them, say, if the word for car [char] was masculine or feminine, they'd have to say it out loud with the masculine article (un) and then the feminine (une). Finally, they would pronounce that, indeed, it was masculine -- un char sounded right.
I provided them with no end of hilarity as I struggled. I remembered that they use the English word for jacket and, one day, pronounced that I'd forgotten ma jaquette. Well, that resulted in howls of laughter because ma jaquette is my nightgown -- mon jacket is my jacket.
Eventually, many of them came down here to visit and to practice their English. I got them back in spades. English is tougher -- glad I was born into it.