While English uses word order to determine the relationship between other words, Japanese uses particles.

Particles are essential to understanding a sentence.

They make a sentence clearer since they can indicate who or what the subject or the object is, where you perform an action, and a lot more.

It also has a similar role to the preposition in English.

Actually, it's rather a postposition in Japanese since particles always follow the modified noun, verb, or adjective.

If you look at the example sentence, there are two particles:

Wa and Wo are particles.

And thanks to the particles, we know that Seiya is the subject.

And Eiga is the direct object here.

In English, if you just look at the word “movie” without any context, you don’t know if it’s a subject or object, right?

But in Japanese, if you see Eiga with the particle Wo even without being used in a sentence, we know that it’s a direct object.

Since particles can completely change the context of the sentence, it's very crucial to use them correctly.

For example, if you switch Wa and Wo without changing the word order, it will be:

The meaning completely changes and now it means:

A movie watches Seiya

There are many particles and one particle can have several meanings.

When you are just starting off, it can be a bit intimidating but don’t worry!

You will learn to use them correctly little by little.