I'm agreeing with you, the word 'their' is a possession usually used for a multiple persons case but in the case marked wrong, it's used unknown gender which is also correct. Their has 2 main uses, one for a possession for multiple persons, the other for a possession of unknown gender.

Of course, I'd say "Someone's lost their purse." But that's beside the point.

On the subject of difficulty in learning the English language, it is apparently hard like most languages are. From most people I talk to it's main due to words sounding similar or having similar composition yet meaning different things. Adding the added factor for USAian's using a different dictionary for some words confuses it more.

Then again, learning foreign languages with male/female/neutral genders for words is weird and makes it more difficult to learn that language. 

I think many languages should get simplyfied. My first language was French and there's many rules, grammar, verbs and the genders that makes no sense and just makes it harder for NO reason. It should be changed, imo.

Some people might not agree with this, but some languages, mainly Asian ones, create barriers and they should get simpler. The main issue being the writing system. Koreans, for example, created a unique writing system that's much simpler than the Chinese and Japanese ones. They still however use some Chinese characters for certain things (that they call Hanja, in Japanese it's the dreaded Kanji).

Some people would argue that those things makes the languages beautiful or unique but I think it's unnecessary. Btw, English is easy to me. Less complicated than French, imo.

Cool, that you learn German.

I can help you out with your problem:

the ending -chen in German is always used to make a word sound smaller or cuter. In Middle-High-German there was "Maid", a common word for a woman (in english it was/is maiden).

So if you see a word like Mädchen with an -chen at the end it always has a neutral gender with "das".

Problems do occure if some possesive pronouns come into play. With Mädchen you would use "ihr". But "ihm" (the male version) is correct as well, as the possesive pronouns of the neutral gender are male (it still sounds awkward, if you would use it with for "Mädchen".

So much about English being complicated^^

And by the way the Sun is not male but female in German :P

Then who did invent it?

On a side similar to the OP I love it when Yanks ask us why we add the letter "R" to the word Ass?

Oh and English has to be an easy if not the easiest language to learn if I managed it.

Hey, In most countries people dont speak correctly their own language, its very common here with spanish, people dont use it correctly and make silly mistakes, of course people that have better education wont make these mistakes.

Unless you go with a strictly descriptive criterion (i.e. whatever gets popular enough is, like, correct), I'm pretty sure using "their" to refer to a single person of unknown gender is wrong.  

[edit:  Damn.  http://searchwarp.com/swa129788.htm
["In fact, the “singular their" construction goes back about 700 years and managed to co-exist with the “neuter masculine" construction for most of that time. Nobody seemed to be much concerned until late in the 1700’s or early 1800’s. That’s when the “prescriptive" grammarians began to attack in earnest because “singular their" didn’t fit with the “logic" of the Latin grammar they were forcing English into. So, it became bad grammar in the same arbitrary way that splitting infinitives and putting a preposition at the end of a phrase did."

(The "neuter masculine" means using "he" when gender is undetermined -- which has become un-PC.)] 

According to wiki the issue is still debated with various grammar books going for whatever they decide on, luckily, one of the big enough authorities does support my usage of the singular they:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they#Gender-neutral_language_movement
For example, The Cambridge Guide to English Usage (2004) expresses several preferences. "Generic/universal their provides a gender-free pronoun, avoiding the exclusive his and the clumsy his/her."[/quote]

Got it.  -chen = das. Thanks. ^_^

The US pronunciation of buoy winds me up for some reason.

And people that pronounce scone as scon.