I'm a native English speaker and taking Kumon's Japanese for 小学校1年生 class
(which is an adventure lol), and it's trying to teach me about 修飾語 right now.
I looked up 修飾語 and everything I can find is telling me that 修飾語 is a
"modifier" in English. Ok, that makes sense.

But one of the example sentences in my homework is 女の子がボールをなげる。And it
identifies ボールを as the 修飾語, modifying なげる。But I'm pretty sure that in English,
in "the girl throws the ball", "ball" would be the direct object. Direct
objects can't be modifiers, can they?

I've managed to thoroughly confuse myself. Am I misunderstanding how modifiers
work? Are 修飾語 slightly different from modifiers in English? What is happening?
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grammar terminology
Are 修飾語 in Japanese different from 'modifier' in English?
Your logic doesn't work when you compare "ball" with ボールを instead of ボール
itself. Is "at him" as in "the girl throws the ball at him" a modifier? If so,
ボールを is no different.

Now, "him" and ボール are an indirect object and a direct object respectively.
However, "at him" and ボールを work adverbially to specify information about the
verb, i.e. you throw not other things or to other directions but a ball at
him, as well as 白い花 indicates not other flowers but white one, in other words,
a modifier for the verb.
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In a site like this, direct objects are usually called direct objects in
English, and 直接目的語 in Japanese. However, in linguistic terms, they _are_
modifiers that modify verbs, both in English and in Japanese. You can read
about it in this Wikipedia article: [Head
(linguistics)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head_\(linguistics\)). To take
the sentence "He plays the guitar" for instance, _he_ is usually called a
subject, but it's also a modifier that modifies the verb _plays_. And _the
guitar_ is usually called an object, but it's also a modifier that modifies
the verb _plays_. Likewise, in this sense, one can say 女の子(が) and ボール(を) are
both modifiers that are modifying the verb 投げる.

Either way, in most cases, you can treat "modifier" and "修飾語" as exactly the
same concept. I think you believe typical modifiers look [like
these](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_modifier#Types), and most
Japanese people believe these are the typical 修飾語, too. If you ask a Japanese
person "Is this ボールを a 修飾語?", they probably say "No it's a 目的語 (object)". But
please keep in mind that the word "modifier" itself can be used in a bit
tricky manner by some experts.
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