RANT: "En Eller Et?" -- The Swedish Language and Its Lack of Rules

So many certain things can be frustrating while travelling to different places. Here's another topic I want to share, and it's one of the more "narrowed down" topics of learning how to speak Swedish.

Image courtesy of Wikipedia {wikipedia.org} 

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Swedish is a relatively easy language to learn. As with every language though, there are some rules to follow. THIS is just one thing that the Swedish language lacks. 

If I wanted to say the definite article (meaning a certain type of thing - e.g "THE house" instead of "A house") of something in English, I would add the word "the" in front of the word. 

-- As in the cases of "THE flowers", "THE bookshef", "THE dog". 

In Swedish, however, you need to know the gender of the certain word, before you change it to its definite article. The two genders are the "en" and the "ett".

-- For example, "hund" (Swedish for "dog"), is an "en" word. To transform this word into its definite article ("the dogs"), you need to add the suffix "en" onto the end of the word. So if you want to say "the dogs" you say "hunden". 

Now... How exactly do you know if a word is an "en" or an "ett" word? NOBODY KNOWS! So it's recommended that you memorize if it's either an "en" or "ett" word from the start. So much more work... 

I think that many other languages are like this (?). Not exactly like this, but are some languages suffering this differently? Do they have too much rules? Or is it like this language that has too little? 

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