(There’s lots of different languages like that.)[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noun_class#language_famalies] For example, Bantu languages like Swahili tend to have a lot of them (18 in the case of Swahili I think) and instead of conjugating verbs for person and number, like most European languages, they conjugate for the genders of the subject and object. Lots of Native American languages also have a difference between “animate” and “inanimate” nouns instead of masculine and feminine, although those languages typically have exceptions, such as “lightning” being animate but “berry” being inanimate.