you’re right that lots of other languages have gendered nouns. however, swedish nouns are not gendered in the “traditional” sense. i.e., it is not the case that some nouns are “masculine” and others are “feminine”.

i think the wikipedia page does a good job of explaining it:

Nouns have one of two grammatical genders: common(utrum) and neuter (neutrum), which determine their definite forms as well as the form of any adjectives and articles used to describe them. Noun gender is largely arbitrary and must be memorized; however, around three quarters of all Swedish nouns are common gender. Living beings are often common nouns, like in en katt “a cat”, en häst “a horse”, en*fluga* “a fly”, etc.

edit: i wanted to clarify that this isn’t some major gripe i have with the language. i think all spoken languages are bound to have their own quirks and that’s okay, it can just make certain things a bit tricky when learning the language. as a whole, i think swedish is a very nice language