No, I'm sorry to say that there is no "trick". The best way is to learn the articles together with the word/vocab in combination.
Hmm... a big deal... for me as a German it could be hard to understand you and for German ears it sounds very strange, when someone is using the wrong article in most cases .
I agree, learning German nouns w/articles and their plurals is the right way to do it, however even this site doesn't follow this rule in its vocabulary learning section. Why so?