Funny enough, the Japanese doesn’t have the word “the” per say. It most depends on context and how you translate it. Example:
ねこは赤です -> literal translation: Cat red
Now time to add some English words to make it sound ✨better✨
“The cat is red”
"Cat red" makes Japanese sounds way more vague than it really is, you're just not bothering to attempt to transliterate the grammar structures because it's too hard for English speakers to understand without a half-hour lecture.
It's "Cat (topic marker) red (basic copula)", which obviously carries a lot more information than just "cat red" to a person who intuitively understands what those weird grammar markers signify
Japanese not having articles is just as weird as PIE languages not having things like topic markers.
I speak bengali and we don't have the word "the" nor do we have any gendered nouns, verbs, or even pronouns. So much easier and straight forward and no pronoun politics necessary.
We do have a respect hierarchy though like japanese, so we have 3 version of the language lol.
Years ago I studied Malayalam while living in India (Malayalam is the language of Kerala state on the southernmost tip of the country). When I learned the grammar I was surprised to see that it had nominative, dative and accusative cases just like German, which was convenient since I'd studied German in high school. Turns out the grammar had actually been sort of imposed on Malayalam centuries ago by a wandering German monk.
Hermann Gundert. I was a bit off: he was a missionary rather than a monk, and it was a century and a half ago rather than "centuries ago". His book on Malayalam grammar was called Malayalabhaasha Vyakaranam. My Malayalam tutor at the time told me that Gundert learned the language in one week, which seems a bit unlikely.
Do you have a source for this? Also, what sort of "exceptions" do you mean? German has cognates of most of the English inherited grammatical exceptions, and has many more classes of its own that aren't reflected in English.
English exceptions aren't so bad, you just need to know that there's a ton of loan words, what their origin was, when it was anglicized, and which country's preferred version you're learning. If it's not a loan word it's either standard or somewhat re-latined to maintain class hierarchy.