The present study seeks to explain the similarities and differences between the usages of the definite article in English and Spanish. Both languages belong to the Indo-European family and share definite articles, while the Korean language does not employ them. In Korea, English is an obligatory school subject for every student, so normally Korean learners of Spanish have prior knowledge of English and its definite articles. Language instructors` acknowledgement and incorporation of this prior knowledge of the English definite article system in the Spanish language classroom could contribute to a higher mastery of Spanish by Korean students. In both English and Spanish, the discursive, visible in the situation, visible in the mind, inclusive/associative, and syntactic usages of the definite article are the same. But in generic usage English only produces it before singular forms of countable nouns, while Spanish uses it not only in the same environment but also before singular forms of uncountable nouns and plural forms of countable nouns in the subject position. That is because Spanish definite articles originated as subject markers in this language and act as concordance markers in number and gender, while in English the subject position is marked by the word order and nouns do not have grammatical gender. In a concrete contrastive analysis of Obama`s speech and its Spanish version, the syntactic usage is more prevalent than any other usages. And the presence of Spanish definite articles with uncountable nouns is salient. In general Spanish shows a stronger tendency to use the definite articles than English.