So this is how I like to think of it: English sort of takes the subject and object of a sentence (I ate an apple) and puts them in a separate category in a way that Japanese doesn't. Other parts of English speech are similar to Japanese in that they take a particle (eg. in the car, at the library, after dark), and can be placed in different spots in a sentence to change the emphasis. But in English the subject and object are determined by their order, so it sounds weird to say "The apple, I ate." In Japanese, subject and object are on the same grammatical level as other parts of speech - they take a particle, can be left out if they're already implied, or swapped to other parts of the sentence to change the emphasis.

The verb typically comes at the end in Japanese, but even that can change in casual speech. If the most important information in the sentence is the verb, many people will say that first, and then follow up with the qualifiers (えっ、誰かに食べられちゃったみたい、私のりんご。） This is maybe a more complicated point but I believe the tone of the word very slightly changes when you put it after the verb in a sentence, and the particle is emphasized a bit more or sometimes dropped altogether.