We present a parallel corpus study that compares the distribution of German contracted/uncontracted articles and Mandarin bare nouns/demonstratives. Work by Schwarz (2009) and Jenks (2018) leads us to predict that German contracted articles pattern with Mandarin bare nouns and German uncontracted articles with Mandarin demonstratives. We show that these predictions are only partly borne out and argue for a more fine-grained typology of definiteness.