I remember (vaguely) my year of Mandarin as an undergrad was similar - though to be fair English is also capable of a lot of word-order tricks for a Subject-Ver

I remember (vaguely) my year of Mandarin as an undergrad was similar - though to be fair English is also capable of a lot of word-order tricks for a Subject-Verb-Object language, we don't have any trouble with "I went to the store yesterday" vs. "Yesterday I went to the store" or even "I went, yesterday, to the store".