Title: Japanese language patterns differ from American English patterns
The Japanese language has a different word order from English. English, as we know, is a subject-verb-object language. While there are some exceptions to this
structure (One swallow does not a summer make; Great oaks from little acorns grow.), most spoken and written utterances follow this pattern. Japanese, however, has a different word order: subject-object-verb. If I were to ask someone how they were, I would say, “Kenki, desska?” Literally translated, this utterance would be rendered as “(You) well are?” This difference in word order makes Japanese for Americans a more challenging language to learn than, say, Spanish which hews to virtually the same underlying structure as English.
Japanese has a few other differences worth mentioning here. Japanese is basically a syllable-timed language. In other words, syllables in Japanese generally get the same amount of stress. English is a stress-timed language. Syllables get unequal stress within words and certain words get less stress than others. Function words (articles, prepositions) in English get less stress generally. The Japanese language lacks articles and prepositions get the same amount of stress as other words within an utterance.