> In "gendered" languages (French and Spanish I know for sure,
> not so sure
> how pervasive it is), nouns have a "gender" such that there
> is no "the"
> as in "the bus", it has to be gendered as in "l'autobus" (not "la
> autobus").  How is gender determined in a noun?  It is an extremely
> foreign concept in English, with a few exceptions (boats are
feminine
> and often referred to that way directly with "she", "her" and
> so forth).

I wouldn't get too hung up on the concept of "gender" here; it really
has nothing to do with the usual usage of that term.

In fully-inflected languages (which excludes English), not only are
verbs "conjugated" based on subject, tense, mode, etc., but nouns and
adjectives are also "declined" based on their usage as subject,
object, possessive, etc. plus their quantity (singular or plural). A
better term for the different groups of noun forms is probably
"declension", which is what they are called in Latin, the source (or
at least the most-directly-accessible ancestor) for most of this
stuff. Latin "1st declension" nouns typically map to "feminine" nouns
in Romance languages, and "2nd declension" usually maps to
"masculine". Of course, Latin has 5 declensions, so "gender" doesn't
provide enough options anyway. Either way, it's important to realize
that "gender" in this usage has absolutely nothing to do with sex;
it's purely a somewhat-misleading "handle" for "style of inflection".

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