German has a profound effect on those who learn it. I do the same thing quite and have to de-capitalize text often! The gender identification of der, die, das sticks with me all the time as well, if only out of frustration in trying to recall the correct gender of an object. One looks at something and for no real reason tries to recall "was that der Stuhl? Or was that die Stuhl?"

A trilingual girl I know speaks German/English/French and is ambitious enough after all this to be studying Serbian (yeah...me too..why???) and she has twice now corrected my pronunciation of common French phrases I use in conversation. I keep waiting to see if all this language diversity will impact her and she will make some slip up in either German or English (giving me a 'gotcha' comeback), but she is very young and it shows how pliable and efficient our minds are when we are young for recording and absorbing lots of new data.

So if you learned German when you were younger, in those crucial formative years, it seems to make all the difference in the world as to how much impact it has on our future thought patterns and linguistic habits.

I already find myself hesitant to learn new programming techniques unless I must and to be honest use only a fraction of the features my cell phone is equipped with simply because I am disinclined to learn all of them. It seems there is a point of diminishing desire to learn certain things as well.

Capitalizing nouns is probably a small price to pay for the learning and working use of Deutsch.

;-)