You don’t have to be a language maven to find the direct object in a basic English-language sentence. Just look next to the verb. Take a simple sentence: “I gave a book to Mary.” In this case the verb, “gave,” is quickly followed by “book,” the direct object. The sentence’s indirect object, “Mary,” lies farther away from the verb.
Things look quite different in Japanese, however, where direct objects pop up all over the place, and are signified by the presence of a language particle, -o. For example: The Japanese sentence, “Taroo-wa hon-o kinoo katta,” means “Taro bought a book yesterday.” But as written in Japanese, the word order is “Taro a book yesterday bought.” The word “hon-o,” or book, is the direct object with the particle, but it is not adjacent to “katta,” which is the verb “bought.”
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