Possible; most non-native spakers I know in “real life” are French, Chinese or German, and articles in French and German are close enough to English. If, as your name suggests, you know more people speaking Slavic languages, you might get a different impression. From Wikipedia (featuring a nice map!):
Linguists believe the common ancestor of the Indo-European languages, Proto Indo-European, did not have articles. Most of the languages in this family do not have definite or indefinite articles; there is no article in Latin, Sanskrit, Persian, nor in some modern Indo-European languages, such as the Baltic languages and most Slavic languages.
That fits with my impression that the most tell-tale sign of a Russian writing English is the lack of articles.
(I agree with your “100% is nearly impossible” bit; the equivalent in French would be the use of grammatical gender; my wife’s been living in France since she was 11 (she’s 30 now), and still makes mistakes a French eight-year-old wouldn’t make).
Possible; most non-native spakers I know in “real life” are French, Chinese or German, and articles in French and German are close enough to English. If, as your name suggests, you know more people speaking Slavic languages, you might get a different impression. From Wikipedia (featuring a nice map!):
That fits with my impression that the most tell-tale sign of a Russian writing English is the lack of articles.
(I agree with your “100% is nearly impossible” bit; the equivalent in French would be the use of grammatical gender; my wife’s been living in France since she was 11 (she’s 30 now), and still makes mistakes a French eight-year-old wouldn’t make).