I think it depends on how you approach learning genders. As a native English speaker, when learning Romance languages I don't think of words as being feminine or masculine. I think of "il pane" as being a single unit, and "la bottiglia" as being another single unit. I've then never struggled when looking at a new Romance language because I'm not thinking "this word used to be feminine and now it's masculine" - I'm just learning new units, as if the articles are part of the word itself.
This extends to other words that must agree. Instead of thinking "the noun is masculine so the adjective must be masculine as well", think "the article is 'il' therefore the adjective is 'buono' instead of 'buona'".
That works, but Russian doesn't have articles. You can, however, mostly get away by assuming that feminine nouns end with -а, -ь, and -я, neutral ones with -о, and all others are masculine.
That helps less than I'd like with the spoken language given that a trailing о or а are pronounced like а because it won't be stressed.
For non-Russian speakers, the two letters get the sound that you expect if stressed, and otherwise sound like а. This rule also applies to borrow words that were transliterated into Cyrillic. So the English computer becomes компью́тер, and the stress goes on ...пью́т... (the English ...put... bit of the word). As a result that first о became an а sound.
My wife's reassurances that Cyrillic is phonetic likewise didn't work out for me. You can't pronounce the written word correctly without knowing where the stress is. You can't write down the spoken word correctly without knowing which unstressed а sounds are written as о.
Of course this is far better than English spelling...
As a native English speaker who learned Russian years ago, the o/a thing never felt confusing to me, perhaps because it felt very similar to what English does. Syllables that aren't stressed tend to be pronounced faster with less of a hard sound, and that's just what the o -> a rule feels like to me.
I always felt like Russian was a pretty easy language to learn because it was so regular. Yes there are a lot of cases and declensions, but once you learn the rules, you can get like 95% of the way there, and then even the last 5% of exceptions are quite "regular exceptions", e.g. the "ogo" written -> "ova" pronounced rule.
That а/о thing is taught extensively in schools. There are formal rules for everything, but of course I don't remember any. What I do remember is these are called "безударные гласные" (unstressed vowels), and "проверочные слова" (test words?) are used to figure out whether it's о or а. The idea is iirc that you find a word with the same root in a different form where that syllable is stressed. Except sometimes there isn't one ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Prepositions don't change based on gender but make the word itself change case (обсуждение -> в обсуждении). The pronouns though, those are gender-specific (он/она/оно, этот/эта/это), regardless of whether they refer to people or not.
Well, you can. But if you're just learning the language, you're going to struggle to find words that don't use a predictable one. And if you do stumble across one of those, and you use 个 instead, people may not even notice.
No one is out there watching to make fun of you if you count horses in 只 instead of 匹.
That is not something that will happen with measure words. Ignoring some grammar will limit you. This is not such a case. Ignoring semantics-free measure words will make you sound like a native speaker.
Chinese measure words are not something that happens on a noun-by-noun basis. Memorizing them as part of a noun is not a well-chosen approach. Most often this will saddle you with the burden of separately memorizing "pass" and "passed" as independent forms of the verb, while providing comparable benefits.
You might have noticed that my comment above suggested that
(a) the default measure word is 个;
(b) the default measure word for a horse is not 个.
This extends to other words that must agree. Instead of thinking "the noun is masculine so the adjective must be masculine as well", think "the article is 'il' therefore the adjective is 'buono' instead of 'buona'".