alt Hacker NewsExcept in Spanish, gender is pretty easily determined from the word ending 99.9% of the time unless it's a Greek neuter, and there are only a few of those.
In French, it's common for people not to remember the gender of uncommon words. IIRC, there is or was a radio program in France that would call up random people and offer them a prize if they could guess the genders of a list of 10 words correctly.
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> in Spanish, gender is pretty easily determined from the word ending 99.9% of the time unless it's a Greek neuter, and there are only a few of those.
Isn't that 99.9% referring to the reliability of spelling heuristics for the words that match a heuristic? For example, the -o and -a spelling heuristic reliably indicates gender something like 99+% of the time, but only about two thirds of Spanish nouns end in -o or -a. There are a few other suffixes with string gender indication, but even then I think you can only account for like 75% of Spanish nouns.
You remind me that France had (maybe still does?) national dictation competitions (championnat national de dictées). Much of French orthography is silent, so can be a real challenge!