My native language is American English, but believe it or not, I find Japanese to have simpler grammatical concepts than German, which always irritated me when I had to write in it. I can understand written German well enough. What bothers me about a lot of Germanic/Romance languages is the assignment of genders to seemingly abstract concepts. After all, how is a lamp, chair or table male/female/neutral? Why should I care? How vital is it in a conversation? Honestly, I'm content to use 'die' or 'der' or 'das' interchangeably and randomly.