Come on, Swedish, are you fucking kidding me?

Lesson 1: Genders in Swedish

In English, every noun that starts with a consonant takes 'a' as the indefinite article, and every noun that starts with a vowel sound takes 'an'. Super easy, and sounds nice too.

a dog
a house
an hour

However, you'll sound like a 'tard if you try the same thing in Swedish:

en hund / a dog
en hus / a house

"Varför," you ask? In Swedish every noun belongs to one of two categories, 'en' or 'ett'. Fortunately, there's a simple rule to remember which group each noun belongs to. Nouns that denote people and animals are 'en', and nouns that don't are 'ett'. So, it's

en kvinna / a woman
en hund / a dog

and

ett hus / a house
ett skepp / a boat

Okay, so no problem, right? Except I was just kidding about that rule, since there's also

ett barn / a child
en båt / a boat
en villa / a house

So you're basically up a creek if you don't know, and it's a 75/25 split between en and ett, so en isn't even that good of a gamble.

Tack så mycket, svenska! / Thanks so much, Swedish!