This paper examines one aspect of article acquisition : the various non-generic uses of the definite article in English. Previous research (Hawkins, 1978) identified four major categories of non-generic use : cultural (the White House), situational (the pub, when members of the same community refer to that place), structural (first mention noun that has a modifier : the movies that are shown here are old-fashioned) and textual (with a noun that has been previously referred to : Fred bought a car last week. Today he crashed the car). The aim of this paper is to determine whether these uses present different levels of difficulty for English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners and whether they are acquired at the same time. The participants (16 elementary-, 31 low-intermediate- and 22 advanced-level learners) read 85 sentences containing 48 deleted obligatory uses of the (12 per category) and 37 distractor items. There was also a control group (15 native speakers). Statistical analyses of the participants' performance indicate that : (i) the four non-generic uses present different levels of difficulty for the EFL learners, (ii) learners underuse of obligatory the decreases significantly from elementary to low-intermediate level but this does not hold for the transition between low-intermediate and advanced levels, (iii) the participants' performance in the overuse of the improved significantly with proficiency level, and (iv) there is a hierarchy of difficulty in the non-generic uses similar to the one proposed by Liu and Gleason (2002) for learners in an ESL setting. Pedagogical implications will be discussed.