Somewhat. But when writing in Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, Polish, Croatian, Ukrainian, Czech, Slovak, Slovene, Serbian, Russian, Madeonian, Bulgarian, Latvian or Lithuanian (and maybe Greek? And how about the Gaelic languages?), you do need the information about genders when writing an adjective about the person you are talking to. So in Spanish "you are lovely" is "eres encantador" or "eres encantadora" depending of whether you're talking to a man or a woman.
Additionally, in most Slavic languages, whenever you talk about anything that has happened in the past, you must always tell the gender of the subject.
So, "Anna, you flew!" and "Michał, you flew!"
are in Polish "Anna, ty poleciałaś!" and "Michał, ty poleciałeś!".
oh, vocative?
Polish has the vocative case, so maybe I should have put the names in vocative case in this example? But because that only affects how the names are written, not the word for "flew", I didn't spend the time to go learn that part of the Polish grammar right now :)
You almost always need to know the gender of the person when talking to them in a Slavic language, and you often need to know it when talking to them in a Romanic language. So, good info to have!
(...and of for me, as a Finn... In my mother tongue there is never any need to know the other person's gender when talking to or about them. Except if you want to explicitly use the words "man", "woman", "boy" or "girl". But even then you can just say "adult" or "child", so whatever.
Every Finn lives their first 7 years without caring a damn about their conversation partners' genders. They are all just people, and that's enough for almost any situation.
It's interesting how often you see children in English classes get angry at the teacher for having to differentiate between "he" and "she". An argument I've often heard is "It is such a hassle for no reason!"
In my eyes, all these very visible gender declarations are programming my brain towards thinking more about people's genders, while I would prefer just ignoring the whole concept of genders in my thinking.)


