There are at least 3 ways to say "the". Der, die, and das. Which one you use depends on if the object you're talking about is femanine or not. To top that off some geographic areas use "das" for everything.
It also has words that are similar to English; toilette (toilet) and hast (have) as a couple similarities.
some geographic areas use "das" for everything - yeah good point. If you ever tooled around the German-speaking sections of Switzerland you'll still find locals complaining that they have difficulty understanding the dialect of another town only a few km away.
The "nouns have gender" stuff isn't quite as weird. It's in many other languages and eventually it isn't too hard to learn the noun as the full "der/die/das ________". Where it gets tricky is when an article (like "der" or "einer") is overloaded and applies to one gender in one case (male, nominative) but to a different gender in another case (female or plural, dative). I wish the mapping were one to one.
It's also worth noting that there are actually two ways to _say_ "the" in English (think "thuh" and "thee"). I would challenge any native English speaker to explain when you use each. ;-)
If referring to written words then use thee if you find yourself in Pennsylvania Dutch country trying to hail a horse drawn taxi or thuh if trying to play dumb while text messaging.
I'd be surprised if you could find any fluent English speaker who says that either pronunciation is wrong in any context where the other is correct. If I'm understanding the description of the German definite articles correctly, the aren't all valid in the same contexts, which is hardly the same thing. (I don't actually know German, but I know a bit of Spanish and Dutch, and in both of those languages the definite articles are not necessarily interchangeable, which is my understanding of German from the above description)