I'll elaborate a bit more on ChrisR awesome answer and bring images from his awesome reference.

A valid JSON always starts with either curly braces { or square brackets [, nothing else.

{ will start an object:

{ "key": value, "another key": value }

Hint: although javascript accepts single quotes ', JSON only takes double ones ".

[ will start an array:

[value, value]

Hint: spaces among elements are always ignored by any JSON parser.

And value is an object, array, string, number, bool or null:

So yeah, ["a", "b"] is a perfectly valid JSON, like you could try on the link Manish pointed.

Here are a few extra valid JSON examples, one per block:

{}

[0]

{"__comment": "json doesn't accept comments and you should not be commenting even in this way", "avoid!": "also, never add more than one key per line, like this"}

[{   "why":null} ]

{
  "not true": [0, false],
  "true": true,
  "not null": [0, 1, false, true, {
    "obj": null
  }, "a string"]
}