I always put the object in my hand and ask wo Hindemith?
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Indefinite articles are unnecessary so long as you are using a definite article.
Saying “put hat on the boy” is just as clear as “put a hat on the boy” and distinct from “put the hat on the boy”. Works for Irish anyway
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Yeah, but then you get sentences like, “The boy had dog,” and you want to believe that we’re talking about a pet, but you can’t be sure.
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Irish manages that without indefinite article.
Bhí madra ag an mbuachaill - basically “dog was of the boy”
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Then how do you distinguish between whether the boy ate an entire dog or just an indefinite quantity of dog meat?
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In the languages I’ve studied so far, this seems more an issue with the verb. There is less ambiguity in saying “to eat” or “to drink” something, although in French there are times when one “takes” breakfast or coffee. Those are the main exceptions that come to mind. Is it common in Japanese to say “having” something in reference to food? 
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With Japanese, the verb is not so much of a problem as long as you have kanji to work with. For example, 犬を飼う means “to have a dog (as a pet),” while “犬を買う” means “to purchase a dog.” They are both pronounced as “inu wo kau,” with nothing but the kanji to differentiate between the two meanings.
The real problem is with the nouns. With the exception of personal pronouns, Japanese nouns do not have plural forms, so there is absolutely no way to tell whether the examples above refer to one dog or multiple dogs without a follow up question. I have translated documents where I had to call up the writer and say, “Did Mr. X meet with one city official or multiple city officials during his trip to Osaka?” And then I would have to explain how, in English, it absolutely has to be one or the other.
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That’s really interesting. I’ve learned several gendered languages, one quite well (French) and I never knew the origin of the genders, but did figure it must have had something to do with PIE. It never made sense to me why inanimate objects were gendered at all. What makes a table feminine, for instance? What makes a swamp (marais) masculine? It’s interesting and confusing, and I’m really glad my native tongue doesn’t have that feature.
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I have heard that some languages are redundant-- if speakers are in a noisy setting, the extra words help to fill in the blanks.
It sounds plausible, but reading is really my thing.
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we still say “e’re” for “every” down here, too. but I think only in compound words; “erebody” mostly, “eretime,” also. the only other place I’ve seen that usage was studying the Shakespeare plays.
the US south is a bastion of older British culture in many ways; the accent is closer, certain traditional Celtic songs live on here, etc
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Isn’t it obvious?
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It’s even less obvious when you language-hop
en: the table
de: der Tisch (M)
fr: la table (F)
en: the bridge
de: die Brücke (F)
fr: le pont (M)
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I started a new system for memorization that suggested assigning a color to each gender. After that, students were supposed to imagine the object in that color. Your example shows why I started imagining little flags along with the objects in specific colors… 
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French is the only Romance language I know - are the others at least semi-consistent in which nouns are masc/fem?
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Typically there’s some morphological hint, and sometimes an etymological one as well.
So Fr. pont, It. ponte < La. pons = 3nd decl masc.
Fr. mense, Sp. mesa, It mensa < La. mensa = 1st decl fem.
Compounds are typically declined as the gender of the second part (because the grammar is carried in the ending). So autopista f. “motorway” ← auto (m. “car”) + pista (f. “track”).
Because the neuter gender tended to vanish, those words had to go somewhere, and there it’s more of a matter of chance. eg., La vestimentum (n. “garment”) > It. vestimento (m.), Fr. vêtement (m.), but Sp. vestimenta (f., derived from the La. plural vestimenta).
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[Mixed language - Wikipedia]
[Spanglish - Wikipedia]
[Portuñol - Wikipedia]
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Well this is highly disappointing. I was just getting back into Duolingo too, but I think I’ll find something else.
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ein Latte is a coffee with milk, eine Latte is a plank of wood. ein Hörnchen is just a homonym: it could be a croissant-like pastry, from Milchhörnchen, or it could be a squirrel, from Eichhörnchen
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