im currently learning some spanish and the gendered thing might have some kind of deep linguistic and anthropological history behind it but mostly from what i can tell it comes down to the flow of the language, like la or el before a word has more to do with how that word flows in the masculine or feminine than anything else

there are exceptions of course like to my ear "la nina" flows off the tongue so much easier than "el nino" due to the placement of consonants being mashed too close together so when learning it i kind of just learn the gender with it because im not studying grammar or word lists but rather listening to the language spoken in context so the flow is always part of it

sometimes its just super obvious like try to say "la hombre" instead of "el hombre" its just so wierd like of course the word is masculine in that flowy sort of way you dont even need to know the word is referring to a man