This is a good general rule but this still breaks down. For instance, I say "I'm going to the bank". But really this means "I'm going to a branch of the bank that I bank with". The same occurs with words like theatre, mall, etc. I kind of think this is a holdover from a time where towns only had one theatre, one bank, one school, etc.

It would be correct to have a conversation like:

> Let's go to the mall.

> Which one?

> I don't know. Do you have a preference?

Then we have places like "school", "work", "home" where we drop the "the". If we say "I'm going to the school" this implies that we're going for a different reason than normal where we'd say "I'm going to school".

Proper names don't usually have "the" in front of them but then we say "The Ukraine" and "The Philippines" and "The Yukon" as if we're distinguishing them from other Ukraines.

My wife is non-native English speaker so I encounter this a lot. I understand the confusion of this. Plus a lot of other languages don't think this way. When you grow up in a language where you don't care about specificity while you're talking, it becomes pretty difficult to start thinking about it later in life.

Slavic languages (and maybe baltic) don't have them (probably also ugro-finnic ones), not sure about e.g. basque or hellenic ones.

Balto-Slavic comes from proto-indo-european and we have similar words (here in English / German / Polish)

'the' -> 'die' -> 'ten' (this) 'a/one' -> 'ein' -> 'jeden/jakiś' (one/one of many)

which come from the same PIE roots, but we don't use them as often. We generally understand from context whether we're talking about something specific or general.

And only use those helpers when we need clarification. There are also other ways to differentiate. For example speaking in singular (cat/kot) may mean 'a specific cat', but saying 'cats/koty' may mean 'a cat/cats'.

In other words, using 'the/a' is in majority of cases unnecessary from our point of view, because if we're talking about 'our cat' for an hour, we don't need to stress that it's 'the cat' that I meant when I said 'cat', or when we say 'Please feed cat' and we have a cat, it's way more likely that it's about our cat than some random cat on the street.

And this creates enormous problems for us when learning English or German (not sure about romance languages). We often ask ourselves, if we know whether we're talking about something specific or in general should we always use 'a/the -> ein/die'. And the answer is 'pretty much'. Unless you don't use it :)

'Love is a powerful emotion', and not 'A/The love is a powerful emotion', and even more elusive cases where those articles are not used.

My first language is Russian. I just don't have mental wires in my mind to fully understand the differences. I know them in theory, but it's hard for me to fluently apply and understand the nuances which is not the case with other language constructions.