When a language is SOV, it is by necessity inflective, rather than distributive, like English. You have to have cases and specialized endings to clarify what the relationship of all those words are to one another. With inflection, word order almost ceases to matter. You also need gender. English has done away with gender except in pronouns. German has remained inflective and has four cases, whereas Latin has six. Norwegian and the other Scandinavian languages have paralleled English. I'm not familiar with Japanese, but what I've read about their code was that it contained nuances going far beyond word order. The Navajo (and other tribes) code talkers say that they didn't even use standard Navajo. Just as you can make up words in English which don't exist in any dictionary, but which have a clear meaning, they did the same in Navajo. It wouldn't have done the Japanese any good if they'd had a Navajo-Japanese dictionary...
That’s an important element wrt pronouns.
I even accidentally left them out in my example sentence.
Japanese people don’t constantly say I, He, She, You, They and that also makes it confusing.
A conversation kind of starts off like a Tennis match and then each reply is like a volley back and forth.
Often once the serve is made with a Subject and especially if the subject is a Pronoun or even a Person’s name it gets dropped until the subject changes again.
I (for example) didn’t understand how frequently we start sentences with (I) in talking about ourselves until I started learning Japanese.
Even if I’m looking at you and you know I’m talking about me I’d still be inclined to say “I did this, I did that, I think that.”
Japanese sentences and conversations don’t flow like that. So much of it is based on established context.
There are lots of nuance too and various levels of politeness and informal speech and slang.
I think we have all those little bits too and inflection carries meaning in both languages but it’s funny how simple everything seems in your native language because you pick it up along the way naturally vs being thrown into a massive sea of new strange grammar rules all at once.
