God, strongly agree. My worse-than-a-coinflip skill at getting French gender correct on nouns that aren't very familiar too me is one of the big things keeping me from returning to it. Deeply discouraging. Thanks to easy rules, I can get Spanish nouns right every time unless I run into one of the exceptions (seemingly all French nouns are an exception to whichever of the dozen or so "rules" they're failing to follow).

I also find spoken Spanish sentences much easier to parse.

For the record, I've put way, way more effort into French than I ever have into Spanish, including enough immersive higher-ed coursework that at one point I was dreaming in it pretty often.

[EDIT] I should add that my greatest annoyance with it is how hard it makes it to practice noun vocab in isolation, which is also kind of vital if you ever want to get past the problem. You can't just consistently practice the more general indefinite form because it's too often abbreviated ("l'au") so then when you go to make some damn adjective agree with it you're lost because you never actually learned the gender. Using the definite article fixes that problem but feels wrong, and never made the gender stick for me anyway. So you basically end up having to practice modifying them with adjectives to get good at nailing the gender every time. That's a fun friggin' Anki deck to put together. eyeroll

I'm teaching Spanish (my native language) to my daughters and my wife, and I disagree. There are many, many nouns that don't mark the gender except in the accompanying article or adjective.

And some that contradict the rule, i.e. 'agua' among other nouns in certain circumstances:

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/agua#Usage_notes

"agua" doesn't break the rule. It's feminine. agua fría.

However, there's another rule that words beginning with an a use el because of the double vowel sound.

That's almost correct. It's not all words starting with 'a', but words staring with a _stressed_ 'a', like "águila", "aula" and "hacha" that use "el" as an article, despite being feminine words. The reason is analogous to the use of "an" in English instead of the article "a".

"Abuela"? "Azúcar" "Abuela"?

Lots of little mnemonics, like man creates el problema, the woman la solution.

Those are both pretty easy, too, because they follow regular rules. "-ma" is always masculine. "-ión" is always feminine.

Actually, “rama” (branch), “cama” (bed), “mucama” (maid) are all femenine.

“Centurión” (roman military rank) and “esturión” (fish) are masculine

Correct. "tema", "teorema" are masculine because they are cultisms, derived directly from greek. Same with "fantasma" and "miasma".

bad 'reason': problema is greek too ⲡⲣⲟⲃⲗⲏⲙⲁ 🇬🇷 problem

And it's masculine too in Spanish. Isn't it in Greek?

There may be exceptions, but noun gender is still vastly more consistent than French.

That's actually why I had so much trouble with it. I feel that every language with this "feature" is wrong. They need to be normalized in to a more proper form where there is no implicit gender for words. Much like I prefer letter forms with less embellishments.

French is particularly egregious. There is no rhyme or reason to it. It's mildly hilarious when speaking with french speakers that only ever learned gutter english, so that all manner of sexless objects aquire genders, and are frequently referred to as being fornicated with by other bizarrely sexed objects.