Dear Duolingo: How can I learn to form sentences in my new language?

Welcome to another week of Dear Duolingo, an advice column just for language learners. Catch up on past installments here.

Welcome back, learners! Today we've got a question especially for new learners, but I couldn't help but squeeze in some interesting linguistic factoids for learners of all levels. Can you remember feeling this way at the beginning of your learning journey?

Our question this week:

This is a really common feeling, Out of order! Especially when you're new to a language, it's easy to feel overwhelmed by all the words you're learning, rules about grammar and endings and word order, not to mention pronunciation, politeness—the list goes on! And especially at the start, it can feel hard to build up your own sentences from scratch.

What we're going to talk about today is called word order: the grammar rules that describe what order to put words in. Today we'll focus on the general rules for different languages, because there's a lot more to say about the rules for questions, negative sentences (like "I am not happy"), and more.

As you might have guessed, word order rules can be really different depending on the language! But naturally, there are some tricks to help.  🎉 Whether you want to learn Spanish, French, German, or any other language—we’ve got you covered.

How to put words together in your new language

What I used to recommend to my students working on forming basic Spanish sentences was to think about them like a formula. You won't need this trick forever, or even for long, but it can be really helpful to get you comfortable building sentences. And with practice, soon you won't need the formulas anymore, because you'll be developing those instincts!

To start, we're going to think of sentences having three parts:

• Subjects. These are the words for the person, place, object, or idea that is doing some action (the verb).
• Verbs. This is the action of the sentence… sort of. "Action" is actually too exciting for many verbs, but it can be a helpful way to think of them. Something is doing something in your sentence, even if it's just being (and be is a verb!).
• Objects. These are also words for people, places, things, etc, but unlike subjects, these aren't the ones doing the action—they have a different relationship with the verb: Maybe they're the thing being given or acted upon, or they're receiving an action, benefiting from something, etc.

Some of those definitions are very, very squishy, so let's look at some example sentences from English:

So we can think of Subject + Verb + Object as a formula for English sentences! English sentences generally have this SVO (Subject + Verb + Object) word order, from short ones to long, complex ones. You can also see that objects aren't always necessary—not all verbs need them!

You can use this SVO formula for some other languages, too. It's the basic formula for many Romance languages, like Spanish and French. Once you know it, you’ll be able to build any basic sentence!

I used to write the three SVO columns on the board in my classroom, and we'd fill them in together to practice creating sentences. You can try that, too! Here are a few simple sentence examples that use these three “slots.”

Spanish

French

Word order around the world

But that SVO formula for sentences isn't the only possibility—and, around the world, it's not even the most common! In fact, Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) is the most common order around the world, and Object-Verb-Subject (OVS) and Object-Subject-Verb (OSV) are used only by a handful of languages for their basic order.

Here are some examples of languages with different basic word orders:

Here are more examples from languages that you might be studying on Duolingo!

Irish and other Celtic languages use VSO as the default sentence formula. Here's how you say The woman eats the sandwich in Irish:

German, on the other hand, doesn't neatly fall into one basic word order category and instead can have many different "basic" orders. One of German's basic formulas is SVO, like in English, but if the German sentence has a two-word verb (sort of like I have seen the movie in English), the verb gets split up. Here's how to say I have the cup and I broke the cup in German:

Where to put adjectives

Of course, in any new language you'll often want to say more than just a simple sentence!  To do that, it’s important to know the placement of other words, like adjectives. Some languages put the adjective before the noun, others after it, and some allow both! 

Let’s look at the phrase the green owl in different languages. In English, Finnish, German, Japanese, Korean, and Turkish, for example, the adjective comes before the noun:

For Japanese, we grouped の (no) with the noun, but it’s actually a particle that links the two words together.

However, far more languages do the opposite: They place the adjective after the noun! This is the case in languages like Arabic, French, Italian, Spanish, Thai, and Zulu:

Luckily, adjectives usually stay next (or very close) to the noun they describe, either directly before or after it—depending on the language. This applies to both subjects and objects:

So, once you know whether the language you’re learning puts adjectives before or after nouns, you’ll be all set to describe the world around you in detail!

Sentences are “made to order” 🍔

Using these formulas is a great way to get started building your first sentences, and soon enough making sentences on your own will feel like second nature! There's also more you can do with these word-order formulas, like looking for these patterns in the sentences you see in your Duolingo lessons. And soon we'll talk about the orders you'll need for other kinds of sentences, too!

If you've got a question about the language you're learning—or language in general!—send it to dearduolingo@duolingo.com.