The Most Basic Rules of Chinese Sentences

Modern Mandarin unfortunately does not have a standard primer or document that every Mandarin speaker agrees upon.  English had at least three centuries of debate and scholarship to form the basic rules of English grammar, but Mandarin had less than a century due to political reasons.  

Fear not!  Here are a few basic rules that govern Mandarin:

1)  Basic sentences follow the subject-verb-object structure (SVO):

The most famous example of this sentence in English is "I kick the ball" (There's a paper written by an academic, but unfortunately I can't find the source).  You can easily identify the sentence components.

The sentence in Mandarin is: "我踢球."  It literally translates to "I/kick/ball."  Notice that "the" is missing, which leads to the next rule.

2)  Chinese is a pronoun drop language, or pro-drop.

After the pronoun is mentioned once, it usually doesn't appear afterwards.  A Mandarin speaker who is starting to learn English tends to drop pronouns.  It may sound blunt and a bit rude, but the overuse of pronouns sounds awkward not just in conversation, but in prose as well.  

For instance, in the English sentence "The book is front of the pencil" translates to "書在鉛筆前面,” which literally translates to "Book/at/pencil/front."

3) Chinese is a left-branching language.

This means that the modifier of basic elements of a sentence placed to the left.  English is a hybrid of left and right branching, but Chinese tends to be more strictly left branching.  So going back to the first example, if I want to add that the ball is yellow, I say "我踢藍球."

Most other rules you have to memorize, play by ear, or apply to specific cases.  Hopefully, this is a good starting point!