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Notes -
The fact that there are two of them serves the same linguistic purpose.
The a/an distinction is exactly like the le/la or un/une distinction in that it's fundamentally a smoothing tool to make the language sound correct when spoken, and is something you just end up getting a feel for after a while because you know by the character of the language which category you're in. (And "gender" is... kind of an ideal way to describe that.)
If we didn't have an in addition to a we would have a glottal stop instead, which isn't really natural in English outside of a few regional dialects.
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"Make the language sound correct" is absolutely not the reason why nouns have gender in Romance languages. They just have it because Latin did. That's it.
And as a native speaker of a Romance language, I can assure you that in my mind, inanimate objects "are" the gender of they word in my language. Same for most speakers of Romance languages, AFAICT.
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In English it's not about "sounding correct" it's about it being easier to pronounce.
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