How Bulgarians use the definite article in English

I have a friend from Bulgaria who tends to use the definite article "the" too often. Does anyone know Eastern European languages enough to help me explain to him the rule in English? The example I received today is "the Western civilization":

the ideology behind the fight against “cultural Marxism” is that we need to defend the Western civilization, because in this way, we are defending Christianity. That is, that the survival of Christianity depends on the survival of the Western civilization. "

I consulted this.

Solution 1:

There are definite articles in Bulgarian language, although there aren’t officially any indefinite - we just use ‘one’ for singular. Here’s brief explanation of how it is used - https://www.google.com/amp/s/blazingbulgaria.wordpress.com/2012/06/06/definite-articles/amp/

Now you see why I wrote articles, not just one article. Not only they are several but we use them a lot in Bulgarian language, and I think that’s the reason of overused def article in English by Bulgarians.

Solution 2:

Contrary to what other users have so confidently asserted, Bulgarian has a definite article. Bulgarian and Macedonian are the only Slavic languages that do; in this they resemble other Balkan languages like Greek and Albanian.

The reason your friend overuses the definite article in English is simply that it's used more often in Bulgarian than in English. However, it would be difficult to explain "the rule" that regulates article usage in English to him seeing as it's irregular. Why don't words like "life," "civilisation" and "nature" take a definite article in English when "world," "afterlife" and "universe" all do? It takes a lot of practice to master grammatical subtleties like this.

If you can understand what your friend is trying to say, there's no need to explain anything to him. He'll develop an intuition for articles and prepositions on his own.

Source: I'm a native speaker of Bulgarian.