Mandarin · Chapter 2 · Lesson 11 · Grammar primer
Word order
Prescribed by the AQA specification.
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
That's the gist. The full article goes deeper - more examples, the edge cases, the why - and the practice below scores like a vocabulary session and earns the same XP.
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24-question session
One question at a time, mixed across the exercises in this lesson. Miss one and it comes back round before the end.
Lesson 11 of 13 in this chapter