Page "Kanbun" Paragraph 5

Kambun, literally " Chinese writing ," refers to a genre of techniques for making Chinese texts read like Japanese, or for writing in a way imitative of Chinese.

For a Japanese, neither of these tasks could be accomplished easily because of the two languages ' different structures.

As I have mentioned, Chinese is an isolating language.

Its grammatical relations are identified in subject – verb – object ( SVO ) order and through the use of particles similar to English prepositions.

Inflection plays no role in the grammar.

Morphemes are typically one syllable in length and combine to form words without modification to their phonetic structures ( tone excepted ).

Conversely, the basic structure of a transitive Japanese sentence is SOV, with the usual syntactic features associated with languages of this typology, including postpositions, that is, grammar particles that appear after the words and phrases to which they apply.

( 1997: 32 )