I've known about some differences, like masculine and feminine words which have 'Los' or 'Las' in front. But I've hadn't thought about the structure to the sentences before. When I was learning French and German they had us learn every word along with the appropriate particle so we would associate them with their proper gender from the beginning. For instance in Spanish you wouldn't learn that car is carro instead you'd learn that the car is el carro (masculine).    You can't cheat by learning one romance language so you would know the universal word gender for other languages, each language have their own feminine, masculine and neutral words and they don't necessarily coincide across languages, for example in French the car is la voiture (feminine)    Word gender is one of the biggest pitfalls I've seen for English speakers when learning Spanish (or any other romance language for that matter). Actually it is a big pitfall even for Romance language speakers when learning another romance language.    One advantage that Spanish has is it being phonetic, if you learn how to pronounce the phonemes you can virtually read anything aloud even if you don't know what are you saying. Actually that's the first thing they teach to small children in Spanish speaking countries, there are booklets, intended for kinder garden level, that have all the possible phonetic combinations in Spanish:  a - e - i - o - u  ba - be - bi - bo - bu  ca - que - qui - co - cu (sounds the same as the k line)  da - de - di - do -du  fa - fe - fi -fo -fu   ga - gue - gui - go - gu  ja - je/ge - ji/gi - jo - ju  ka - ke - ki - ko - ku (sounds the same as the c line)  la - le - li -lo -lu  lla - lle - lli - llo - llu (sounds the same as the y line)  ma - me - mi - mo - mu  na - ne - ni - no - nu  ña - ñe - ñi - ño - ñu (virtually the only nasal sounds in Spanish)  pa - pe - pi - po - pu  ra - re - ri - ro - ru (soft r similar to the one in English)  rra - rre - rri - rro - ruu (strong r typical of Spanish, rolling your tongue, this is one of the most common pitfalls for English speakers, you usually make no difference between r and rr)  sa - se/ce - si/ci - so - su (Depending on the country and I think even regions of Spain, se,si and ce,ci can be pronounced differently or the same, if different se is like tha in thanks and ce is like se in sense)  ta - te - ti - to - tu  va - ve - vi - vo - vu (these also depend on the region/country, in some is indistinguishable from b in others is similar to the one in English)  wa/gua - we/gue - wi/gui - wo/guo - wu/gu (gue and gui here should have an accent that looks like two points above the u this -> ¨ for some reason they don't show up with the vowel, without that accent those phonemes sound different, like the g line)  xa - xe - xi - xo - xu  ya - ye - yi - yo - yu (sounds the same as the ll line)  za - ze - zi - zo - zu (these also depend on the region/country, in some is indistinguishable from s in others is similar to the one in English)