This legitimately trips up learners. How if the noun is female, it’s correct to use feminine articles/pronouns/etc regardless of the person’s gender, even if you know they’re male. (or vice-versa).
That and plurals defaulting to male.
It might be, you know, hear me out, that “grammatical gender” is a historical misnomer caused by linguistics initially practically only looking at Indo-European languages, which tend to have three noun classes with the word for “woman”, “man”, and “thing” all being in a different category so they became known as feminine, masculine, and neuter, with words assigned to them pseudo-randomly via phonetics. But really noun classes are a much more general thing, Bantu languages have up to 20. Persons, fruits, plants, locations, such things.
At least in Indo-European languages it’s mostly about ease of reference: “I see a cup and a table. She is broken”. Assuming that cup is female and table male (as in German) that is a very clear and concise statement.
