I always thought that learning German with an English base would be easier since they have the same Germanic root, what I learnt was that Spanish would be a great tool too. Modern English doesn't have gender nouns like German and Spanish do. In my case as a native Spanish speaker I picture words in my head with a gender like "la luna" (the moon) and "el sol" (the sun), being "la luna" a feminine noun and "el sol" a masculine noun. In German it is the opposite "der Mond" (the moon) and "die Sonne" (the sun), being "der Mond" a masculine noun and "die Sonne" a feminine noun. This make a short circuit in my mind, do you think that your native language shapes the way you think about things?
I discovered that unlike other Germanic languages, English lost its gender nouns transforming in the language we now Today. Anne Curzan (Linguist) has a hypothesis that the grammatical gender in English vanished between the 11th and 13th centuries. She states this change could be because of the Norse influence after the vikings invasions on English territory. Even when Old English and Norse had Germanic roots, they both had differences and in order to communicate, their language evolved. Do you think that gender nouns could die out in the future?