Hard agree on the unnecessary gendering of words! Actress, sorceress, MISTRESS? So if my master happens to be a woman I'm supposed to denote that with a softer-sounding word? Why???

... it's possible we are talking about different phenomena, given the second paragraph which I only read just now. ^^;;;;

well, let me tell you a tale....

there are some words this goes for in English, like the ones you named. but it's not mandatory, since English doesn't have a grammatical gender by default. you guys have only one article, "the" and "a/an". which is always neutral. in languages like German and Italian, *every* noun has one of 3 genders: male/female/neuter. A Doktor (or more commonly "Arzt" ) in German is a male noun, hence it needs to be referred with male pronouns. even when the person you're talking about is a woman. so some of these languages developed a habit of feminizing words, i.e. creating female version of nouns. Doktor becomes Doktorin, and Arzt becomes Ärztin. it is every bit as stupid as it sounds. but it's gotten so common that it's just accepted as standard practice these days. and people can't differentiate anymore between grammatical gender (which was never supposed to hint at the gender of the person in question), and the biological sex of the person you're referring to. this has in recent years lead to some major conflicts of those demanding for more "gendering" of words, because there is an unfair balance towards male nouns opposed to female nouns, especially when referring to occupations. it's a giant mess over here in ye old Europe, disagreement over whether gendering is good or bad, is *the* friendship destroying topic nowadays.

tl;dr: don't bring up "Gendersprache" in causal conversation, you will start a never-ending ideology war.

Dude, as someone who speaks English as main language, but has taken a few German classes and studied it some during the darkness that is 2020, it can be very confusing. Granted English has its own special things as well I before E except after C other than a mind numbing amount of exceptions anyone. I always say even though it is my first language it is a silly language at times.

mad respect for trying to learn German, i've been told it's hard as balls, lol.

Ist sowieso ne aussterbende Sprache, wird hoffenltich bald durchs Internet komplett durch Englisch ersetzt.

I admit it has been a little while since I last practiced so I don’t know 100% what your saying at the bottom but I know enough to understand what your saying something about me complaining on the internet. Also English is a Germanic language and pure Latin is a romance one so there’s that, also I had to suffer through a few Spanish classes back in elementary school but I remember next to nothing there, like I could find the bathroom and nothing more. Also while English my may not have any gendering nonsense it has so many stupid things that even as a main language can be confusing. Like I almost always have confusion over me vs my. And that is not getting into any of the advanced concepts. My Dutuch ist nicht so gut. Like I probably should pratice more but I mainly took during college and before I got my job pandemic and all. Also don’t get me started on the strange quirks between British English and English USA edition. By the way I mainly US English if you can’t tell.

I use British + American English randomly mixed, whichever i bloody prefer in the moment, lol. As standard we learn British English in school, English is a mandatory class in elementary school here. But i got my hands-on experience from watching American movies, playing American versions of games, and of course hanging in English language chatroom and message boards.