Board Thread:Questions and Answers/@comment-35757757-20200203003317/@comment-44719384-20200203004504

Because Japanese is such a catastrophically different language from English, is the short answer.

Japanese is also what I have heard described as a "high-context" language, which means that a lot of times, especially in speech and lyrical writing, entire words will be left out of the sentence, because context makes them a bit redundant.

For example, in Japanese all you need to make a complete sentence is an inflected verb (taberu). In contrast, in English you need a subject, and object, and a verb (I eat it). Japanese will often leave out subjects and objects (usually pronouns like I, you, we, which must be determined from context.)

There are tons of other differences; Japanese has no future tense, present and future tense are the same thing. Colloquial language consists of contractions and can be hard for machine translation tools to identify (tayotte shimae -> tayocchae). Word order can generally be flipped around at will as long as particles are kept attached to the correct words.

And the list goes on...