Well, I mastered articles as a non-native speaker of English but I needed 30 pages of rules to master them. For example, if we talk about things in general, we have a lion, lions and the lion. When do we use which? The lions (the + plural nouns) are not basically used to refer to 'things in general' (at least the majority of the grammar books (why am I using the here by the way. If 'the object' of this 'of' is preceded by "the noun meaning 'the proportion of something + of,' you need 'the' before 'the noun preceded by the phrase'). Then we have 'the medical doctors.' We use 'the + plural noun' in front of professions even when we talk about things in general (There are other things like this). This is one of the many examples. What you pointed out is very important and my first step was understanding these 7 rules. But because there are too many rules based on actual usages, many of which are illogical as is often the case of the things humans do and which was where I got stuck for a while, it is very difficult to master articles. Taken to the hospital or to hospital? Go to college, go to the college or go to the university? I bet British English speakers and American English speakers have different answers for this. As I mastered it, I found out that the use of articles sometimes vary even among native-speakers of English. So I am not saying that you are wrong. This is the very first step to mastery but you need to know more than these rules.  Maybe you should have given this article a tile like : 7 Steps to Starting to Master Articles. Then I would not have written something like this and nodded.