When you are learning English, you find it not clever to put an English sentence, word for word, into your own language. Take the sentence “How do you do?” as an example. If you look up each word in the dictionary, one at a time, what is your translation? It must be a wrong sentence in your own languge.

Languages do not just have different sounds; they are different in many ways. It’s important to master the rules for word order in the study of English, too. If the speakers put words in a wrong order, the listener can’t understand the speaker’s sentence easily. Sometimes when the order of words in an English sentence is changed, the meaning of the sentence changes. But sometimes the order is changed, but the meaning of the sentence donesn’t change. Let’s see the difference between the two pairs of sentences.

“She only likes apples.”

“Only she likes apples.”

“I have seen the film already.”

“I have already seen the film.”

When you are learning English, you must do your best to get the spirit of the language and use it as the English speaker does.