Your story was humorous, Alexei. Yes, articles are weird. I realize that there are many cases where we can use either one… or none. I never thought about how confusing that might be until a Farsi speaker asked me about it (apparently there are no articles in Farsi either, if I understood it correctly).

For me, as a non-native German speaker trying to learn German, what confuses me so much is prepositions. Prepositions are arbitrary in any language, but wow, in German, there are so many more. Then there are all the grammatical cases and moods that English doesn’t really bother with after so many centuries of becoming simplified. It’s a jungle! But all we can do is keep trying…