Where Time, Place, and Manner Go in a Sentence

English is pretty relaxed about where you drop extra information. "I'll meet you tomorrow at the station" and "At the station tomorrow I'll meet you" both work. Chinese is stricter. Time, place, and manner have set positions in the sentence, and putting them in the wrong spot sounds off. The good news is the rules are simple and very consistent once you learn them.

The big idea: setup comes before the verb

Here's the one principle that covers most of it: in Chinese, the information that sets up an action comes before the verb, not after it. When something happens, where it happens, and how it happens all get settled first, and then you say the action.

This is the opposite of English, which usually puts that stuff after the verb. Keep that flip in mind and most of this will click.

Time: usually right after the subject

Time words tell you when, and they sit near the front, either right after the subject or even before it.

• 我明天去学校。 (I'm going to school tomorrow.) Literally: I / tomorrow / go / school.
• 他们昨天来了。 (They came yesterday.)
• 我每天六点起床。 (I get up at six every day.)

You can also move the time word to the very front for emphasis or flow:

• 明天我去学校。 (Tomorrow I'm going to school.)

What you can't do is stick it at the end the way English does. 我去学校明天 is wrong. The time comes before the verb, full stop.

Place: before the verb, with a coverb

Place tells you where, and to say it you usually need a little helper word like 在 (zài, "at/in"). The pattern is 在 + place + verb, and the whole thing sits before the main verb.

• 我在家吃饭。 (I eat at home.) Literally: I / at home / eat.
• 他在公司工作。 (He works at the company.)
• 我们在公园跑步。 (We run in the park.)

Notice 在家吃饭 puts "at home" before "eat," which is backwards from English "eat at home." That's the setup-before-verb rule again.

One thing to watch: a few verbs of arriving or being located do take the place after them, like 去 (go), 来 (come), and 住 (live). You say 我住在北京 (I live in Beijing), with the place after the verb. These are a small group, so just learn them as they come.

Manner: how something is done

Manner tells you how. There are two common ways it shows up.

If the manner is a setup for the action (the conditions under which you do it), it goes before the verb, often with 地 (de):

• 他们高兴地唱歌。 (They sing happily.) Literally: they / happily / sing.
• 请慢慢地说。 (Please speak slowly.)

But if you're describing how well or to what degree the action came out, that's a different structure using 得 (de), and it goes after the verb. This is the complement of degree, covered in its own article later. A quick preview:

• 他跑得很快。 (He runs fast / He runs quickly.) Literally: he / runs / [得] / very fast.

So manner-as-setup goes before with 地, and manner-as-result goes after with 得. Don't stress the 地/得 split yet; there's a whole article on telling those apart.

Putting it in order

When you've got several of these at once, the usual running order is:

Subject → Time → Place → Manner → Verb → Object

For example:

• 我明天在家认真地学习中文。
  (I'm going to study Chinese seriously at home tomorrow.)
  Literally: I / tomorrow / at home / seriously / study / Chinese.

Stack them up and you can see the logic: who, then when, then where, then how, then finally the action and what it acts on. Everything that frames the action lines up in front of it.

The one rule to remember

If you forget the exact order, fall back on the core idea: Chinese front-loads the setup. Time, place, and manner describe the circumstances of an action, so they come before the verb, not trailing after it like in English. Get that flip down and your word order will be right far more often than not.