Korean word order: the verb always comes last
Subject – Object – Verb, and why that changes everything
Korean puts the verb at the end. Always.
English says I eat rice. Korean says 저는 밥을 먹어요 — literally *I rice eat*. The verb never moves. Once you accept this, half of Korean sentence structure stops being surprising.
You cannot guess the meaning until the sentence ends.
This is the real consequence. 저는 밥을 먹지 않았어요 (I did not eat) and 저는 밥을 먹었어요 (I ate) differ only at the very end. Listen to the whole sentence before deciding what it means — a habit English speakers have to build on purpose.
Word order elsewhere is loose, because particles carry the roles.
밥을 저는 먹어요 is still grammatical. The particle 을 marks 밥 as the object no matter where it sits. That is why particles matter more in Korean than position does.