Comment by aleph_minus_one

> It sounds very strange and gives me some idea of what French speakers must go through when they hear me say “le voiture” or whatever.

As a native German speaker (where there exist 3 genera [1]), I can tell you how it feels:

The genus basically feels like a type of a variable in a programming language; if you use a wrong type for a variable in your computer program, you immdiately know that the program is wrong, and it won't compile.

Sometimes, you also can use specific words with a specific genus, so that a reference to it by pronouns gets unique (in terms of programming, I'd claim that this feels a little bit like doing register allocation by hand).