Yes - we can friends be

Ja, wir können Freunde sein - so why can we not just say: yes - we can friends be?? Or why couldn't we just say: where live you? Why do we have to struggle with: where do you live?

Someone told me that Mark Twain wrote a short article once on how to improve the German language - and apparantly one of his suggestions was to put the verb pretty close to the subject like: we can be friends ....so instead of saying : wir können Freunde sein he proposed: wir können sein Freunde. So let us not just be friends - maybe we should also become more flexible in how we use our mother tongues...