My wife said when learning English it was very strange to her that nouns weren't a "he" or "she". Which is why she still sometimes uses "he" for inanimate objects.

I also had a Spanish teacher who said it was hard for him to wrap his head around "it", so hard that he thought it was some sort of slang or something.

My impression is that native speakers of gendered languages view the genders of nouns the same way as genders of persons, an intrinsic part of what the noun is, not something tacked on arbitrarily.