Okay, you have a good point here. I don't actually speak any Hindi, and I was under the impression that it was easy to pick up. I've not yet tried to learn Hindi -- been putting it off as I don't see any immediate use to it. (I won't be in India for long.) I didn't know it had grammatical gender. I remember taking some French in high school, and being pissed off at the gender assigned to every object. I don't know why languages do this.

Perhaps a language research institute should be set up to construct a simple easy-to-learn language that sort-of meshes together the major Indo-Aryan tongues (Hindi, Bengali, Punjabi, Marathi, Gujarati, etc.) -- something that would be easy for the speakers of those languages to learn; but also not too hard for speakers of Dravidian languages. :)