I think one of the most annoying parts of learning a foreign language is figuring out the gender of all the words and thus the articles that go with them. How did genders come about for nouns? French and Spanish have a rather understandable two, masculine and feminine, but then German throws in a third, neuter. I'm not too familiar with French and Spanish, but German also changes the article depending on the tense of the word: "der" for main noun, "den" for direct object, "dem for indirect object. And that's just the masculine definite article. Throw in the other genders and the indefinite articles and German has about 15 different articles.

English, on the other hand, though so closely related to German, has just three simple articles, "the", "a" and "an". Why the vast difference between so similar languages? And why, when English phonetics are so confusing, are the indefinite articles based on whether the word starts with a vowel or a consonant?