My calendar must be wrong...

It doesn't work that way: those languages are much more different than English, so any of their speakers has to completely rewire their brain in order to write prose in English, and the usage of articles and pronouns come as par for the course.

If a Turkish or Japanese speaker, for instance, would try to think in their mother tongue and write in English (as most Russians do), the output will be complete gibberish rather than just missing articles or using them in a non-idiomatic manner.

> Articles (and determiners generally) are more of a western/central European thing

Take care with those areal typology statements. If there's a language which had articles both in its ancient (>3000 years) and modern incarnations, it's Greek, not Latin or Germanic. Also, most languages spoken in Eastern Europe have articles, sometimes in opposition to languages from the same group (e.g. Bulgarian, Hungarian, Albanian, Romanian, etc).