Rapidly starting to think of myself as a “citizen of the world” because I have lived or spent significant time in 5 countries and can see the good and bad in each of them. I love to travel, because I enjoy learning from different cultures, and enjoy opening myself up to different ways of doing things, not just mine.
Politically a centrist - I know this because those on the right say that I must be a socialist and the ones on the left say I am a political conservative, so I know I must be doing something right (and no, no amount of bullying will change how I choose to self-identify).
Religiously agnostic - I very much respect people’s rights to believe whatever they want, as long as they can respect mine.
I will let labels describe me, I will not let labels define me. If you are going to judge me based on your understanding of what the few things I have shared above mean, then we probably aren’t going to have much of a constructive discussion.
There are 38 languages that have masculine and feminine nouns, including French, Spanish, and Italian. 37 have 3 grammatical genders, including German, Dutch, Latin, Russian, Norwegian and even Old English, and 12 languages have more than 3 - the most being Shona (spoken in Zimbabwe) with 20.
So if that is the criterion you are using to indicate complexity, then German is far from being the worst.
As for its use - it’s a very good way to distinguish between similar-sounding words, for one.
For what it’s worth, Germans say that English is incredibly complex to learn to speak properly. With German you have a set of rules and very few exceptions to them (like irregular verbs) - with English there are fewer rules but lots of exceptions, especially in things like correct word order. Pronounciation is also a thing - in German, if you know how it’s spelled, you know how to pronounce it - in English you have to learn how to pronounce it for the different meanings. In German if you hear it you can usually spell it, in English you often can’t.
Examples are words like “enough” and “through”; “too” and “to”; “sew” and “threw” - so many examples. That becomes incredibly complex.
