This shit again...

Why are you so hung up on "gender"? Just replace it with "group" and you'll find the exact same situation in almost all languages.

In Swedish words are not gendered. But to specify the singular we use one of two groups. En or ett. It can be a word before what you want to specify. Or a suffix.

En banan, (a banana) Banan-en, (the banana)

Or perhaps.

Ett körsbär, (a cherry) Körsbär-et, (the cherry)

It's just one if two groups. Has nothing to do with gender. But if you really want to, we can pretend it's gendered because it doesn't matter. It's gonna be one or the other regardless.

Now tell me. How is this different from "gendered" languages? And as a bonus. There is NO rule regarding which to use when. You just have to know.

The baguette, croissant, and beret are killing me.

I'll help you.

The word "machine" in French is... "machine", yeah it's spelled exactly the same. Just pronounce it a lot more like French (stress falls on the 1st syllable instead of the 2nd). Oh, and it's feminine, which gives you "une machine".

Washing in French is "laver". In French, there's this thing called "complément de nom", where you add a noun to another noun to make a compound noun. However, there must be a preposition in between, and each compound noun has its own preposition, which means, you gotta learn them by heart (like the phrasal verbs in English except the meaning is actually related to the word).

In the case of this word, you'd use the preposition "à". You will end up with "une machine à laver", which translates literally to "a machine to wash".

Yeah, languages are complicated.

Someone once told me everything is feminine unless it has something to do with power or industry.