This is a good general rule but this still breaks down. For instance, I say "I'm going to the bank". But really this means "I'm going to a branch of the bank

This is a good general rule but this still breaks down. For instance, I say "I'm going to the bank". But really this means "I'm going to a branch of the bank that I bank with". The same occurs with words like theatre, mall, etc. I kind of think this is a holdover from a time where towns only had one theatre, one bank, one school, etc. It would be correct to have a conversation like: > Let's go to the mall. > Which one? > I don't know. Do you have a preference? Then we have places like "school", "work", "home" where we drop the "the". If we say "I'm going to the school" this implies that we're going for a different reason than normal where we'd say "I'm going to school". Proper names don't usually have "the" in front of them but then we say "The Ukraine" and "The Philippines" and "The Yukon" as if we're distinguishing them from other Ukraines. My wife is non-native English speaker so I encounter this a lot. I understand the confusion of this. Plus a lot of other languages don't think this way. When you grow up in a language where you don't care about specificity while you're talking, it becomes pretty difficult to start thinking about it later in life.