Because of deep differences in the way Korean and English handle fundamental units of syntax—how the languages structure and order phrases—they sometimes appear like mirror images of each other. From my perspective, everything in Korean is backwards!
Take a straightforward sentence like this:
"I saw the tree in the vicinity of the library."
In Korean, this could be translated like so:
나는 도서관의 근처에 나무를 봤어요.
Reading from the beginning, one word at a time, you get:
"I / library's / vicinity-in / tree / saw."
But flip it around and read from the end of this sentence to the beginning, and you get:
"Saw / tree / in vicinity / of library / I."
If you ignore the fact that Korean doesn't have articles like English does and that both English and Korean typically stick their subjects at the beginning of the sentence (when Korean actually uses a subject), you see that structurally Korean and English are like opposites. The ways they string together their word groupings are reversed.
Sometimes, when I'm having trouble translating a tough (or not-so-tough) sentence, my teacher will have me start from the end and work my way to the front. In this way—once I've interpreted it the way no one could ever interpret a spoken sentence—it all makes sense.
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