Look at the following two English sentences:
(a) Happily Ryan yesterday the in park students saw other playing soccer with a leather new soccer yellow ball expensive.*
(b) Yesterday Ryan saw the other students happily playing soccer in the park with an expensive new yellow leather soccer ball.
Both sentences use exactly the same words but only the second one seems to make much sense doesn’t it? This is because of the order in which the words are arranged. Every language has some system or pattern for arranging words in a sentence for the sentence to make sense. We sometimes call this system “rules of word order”. A fluent speaker of the language will quickly sense that the word order is wrong even if they can’t explain the rules because they are just so used to the pattern, but when you are learning a new language it is more difficult, so one way is to learn the “rules”. The pattern in Afrikaans is fairly similar to the one in English, but there are some differences that you need to watch for.
A useful little memory aid to help you learn the word order in Afrikaans is the word S(v)TOMP(v)I.
The following two video clips explain this very well. Watch them carefully and then use the comments box at the end of the blog to post any questions or comments you have.
Just click on the underlined video titles to open the video clips