But yeah, referring to women as GRAMMATICALLY neuter still weirds me out a bit (but not as much as confining the simple past tense to writing.) Frankly, English is so declension-lite I doubt I or probably any native speaker can ever get used to that part of other languages; it remains one of my biggest challenges with Norwegian, because (as the sex/gender disjunct demonstrates) it has no rule: One must simply MEMORIZE the gender of EACH noun—or guess. "Norwegian As She Is Spoke" permits some cheating, because the masculine gender is increasingly displacing the feminine, so its exclusive use increasingly doubles the chance of accuracy by sheer luck. And I never need worry about subject/verb agreement, because each verb only has one form for each tense (unfortunately, there are FOUR "regular" past tenses and, sadly, each must also be memorized for each verb.)