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My "English" teachers never did a very good job teaching formal grammar. It was my 10th grade German class that forced me to learn formal grammar. It was necessary to master both English and German grammar to get the concepts right.

LOL, same for me. I didn't know about conjugating verbs in English until I took German in high school. Also, I was very fluent in Shakespeare's plays, and his sentence structure helped me with German.

As a native English speaker the Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) structure was implicitly understood. When I took a dive into Welsh, I discovered it is VSO. Gaelic is also VSO. Japanese is more "flexible" inserting "particles" to mark the part of the sentence structure. Nihongo ga wakari masu ka breaks out as subject Nihongo (the Japanese language) "ga" marks the subject. wakari masu translates as "understand". "ka" is the question particle. The whole phrase means "do you understand the Japanese language?". I'm a rank beginner in Japanese. Still sorting through hiragana to amuse myself reading the wallpaper at the local sushi shop. It also has some complex kanji that is way beyond my level of experience.