Chinese Mandarin has no the/a/an, and I believe most languages from the Sino-Tibetan family do the same. It is normally clear in the context anyway so (surprisingly) doesn't even lead to any confusion. They do have 'measure words' which can be used in a similar sort of function to a/an, but they are a bit more abstract.
My native language is Czech which is a Slavic language and we do have something similar to English articles. I think that sometimes it's more difficult to learn something that is kind of similar to what you are used to but not entirely the same - it gets really confusing.
If you think it's hard in English, don't try to learn German then, grammatical cases are a pain in the butt.