Mandarin · Chapter 1 · Lesson 3 · Grammar primer
Word order in Mandarin
Subject, verb, object - and the moments Mandarin bends the English order.
The short version
Time and place sit before the verb, always
The single biggest word-order divergence from English. The shape is Subject, Time, Place, Verb, Object, so 'I'm going to Beijing tomorrow' comes out as I-tomorrow-go-Beijing. Dropping the time word at the end, as English does, produces ungrammatical Mandarin every time.
我明天去北京 wǒ míng tiān qù běi jīng
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