All exceptions aside, Mandarin is a save-the-best-for-last language. Here “the best”, meaning the “predicate”, the chunk that contains the verb, is thrown far to the end, and we fill the gap between the subject and verb with less important information, such as time, place, co-doers, and means/material.
On the contrary, English is more of a get-right-to-the-point language. This language introduces the predicate right after the subject and throws those less important pieces of info to the end. And amazingly those less important pieces are usually arranged in the reversed order of Mandarin.
Simply put, the cars in the train of thought in a Mandarin-speaking mind tends to go in the following order:
Subject → Time → Place → Co-doer → Means/Material → Verb (→ Object)
But in English it becomes:
Subject → Verb (→ Object) → Means/Material → Co-doer → Place → Time
Hence, the following sentence in Mandarin...
我(subject)→昨天(time)→在家(place)→和弟弟(co-doer)→用水彩(means/material)→畫了(verb)→一幅畫(object)
I (subject) → yesterday (time) → at home (place) → with my brother (co-doer) → in watercolors (means/material) → painted (verb) → a picture (object)
...would be “I painted a picture in watercolors with my brother at home yesterday” in English.