I used to work in academia with a Chilean guy who added extra articles where they weren’t needed and a Slovakian guy who didn’t put any in at all. I had fun editing the papers we wrote!
Spanish has definite and indefinite articles like English, so at least the concept is not unknown. However, even then, the correct usage is sometimes really arbitrary and varies across languages, e.g. why is it typically "mankind" and not "the mankind" (by contrast, in German it's "die Menschheit", with an article)?
