How does the word order work in Russian?

Compared to English Russian is way more flexible with word order in sentences. For instance, when you asking something in English you would usually start with the verb from the following group: are, do, will, etc. However, when not making specific questions (those starting with why, what, etc.) in Russian you can just change the intonation of a usual sentence (e.g. "Он пойдет сегодня на работу."/"He will go to work tomorrow.") to the intonation you would use when questioning something or just add a question mark at the end when writing the question.

Another difference is that in usual sentences it would be likely that even if you randomly position the words it will still make sense. For instance, stetements "Моя мама купила кукурузу в магазине." ("My mother bought corn is the store.")and 'Мама моя кукурузу в магазине купила." ("Mother my corn in the store bought.") are both gramatically correct. (In English you are very unlikely to use the second one and still get the point through.)

However, there is one common feature of sentence grammar in Russian and English: both have sentence elements. This is great because then comparing your Russian writing to English one, you can use the same method of figuring out whether your sentence makes sense by finding the subject and then cheching whether all your predicates properly relate to it.

But you need to be accurate here because same as written English, written Russian can have sentences which do not necessarily have the key sentence elements. This can most often be seen in fiction writing. For instance, "Дождило." would be a whole sentence made from only one verb which would literally mean "It rained."