1. Where are the "gathering" trainers? Is Gathering even a profession? Can anyone go mine ore now or do you need to get blacksmithing? etc?
Gathering professions have been merged with their corresponding crafting professions, that is:
All alchemists can gather herbs.
All blacksmiths and weaponsmiths can mine ore.
You cannot level those professions by gathering anymore, so you need to craft to be able to gather higher level herbs and/or ore.
2. In Novograd I noticed chat was fun of non-English speaking players. Is the English speaking population out-numbered here? If so, is there a alrge guild I could join with chatty players?
I can't really answer that properly, I have not played on the f2p server since they introduced subscription server.
But knowing for a fact that current f2p server is a merge of German, French, Italian, Turkish, Arabic, Brazilian and english-speaking servers, one can expect english-speaking people to be greatly outnumbered.