The grammar of Standard Chinese shares many features with other varieties of Chinese. The language almost entirely lacks inflection; words typically have only one grammatical form. Categories such as number (singular or plural) and verb tense are often not expressed by grammatical means, but there are several particles that serve to express verbal aspect and, to some extent, mood.

The basic word order is subject–verb–object (SVO), as in English. Otherwise, Chinese is chiefly a head-final language, meaning that modifiers precede the words that they modify. In a noun phrase, for example, the head noun comes last, and all modifiers, including relative clauses, come in front of it. This phenomenon, however, is more typically found in subject–object–verb languages, such as Turkish and Japanese.

Chinese frequently uses serial verb constructions, which involve two or more verbs or verb phrases in sequence. Chinese prepositions behave similarly to serialized verbs in some respects, and they are often referred to as coverbs. There are also location markers, which are placed after nouns and are thus often called postpositions; they are often used in combination with coverbs. Predicate adjectives are normally used without a copular verb ("to be") and so can be regarded as a type of verb.

As in many other East Asian languages, classifiers (or measure words) are required when numerals (and sometimes other words, such as demonstratives) are used with nouns. There are many different classifiers in the language, and each countable noun generally has a particular classifier associated with it. Informally, however, it is often acceptable to use the general classifier gè (个; 個) in place of other specific classifiers.

In Chinese, the difference between words and Chinese characters is often not clear, this is one of the reasons the Chinese script does not use spaces to separate words. A string of characters can be translated as a single English word, but these characters have some kind of independence. For example, tiàowǔ (跳舞; 'jump-dance'), meaning 'to dance', can be used as a single intransitive verb, or may be regarded as comprising two single lexical words. However, it does in fact function as a compound of the verb tiào (跳; 'to jump') and the object wǔ (舞; 'a dance'). Additionally, the present progressive aspect marker zhe (着) can be inserted between these two parts to form tiàozhewǔ (跳着舞; 'to be dancing').

Chinese morphemes (the smallest units of meaning) are mostly monosyllabic. In most cases, morphemes are represented by single characters. However, two or more monosyllabic morphemes can be translated as a single English word. These monosyllabic morphemes can be either free or bound – that is, in particular usage, they may or may not be able to stand independently. Most two-syllable compound nouns often have the head on the right (e.g. 蛋糕; dàngāo; 'egg-cake' means "cake"), while compound verbs often have the head on the left (e.g. 辩论; biànlùn; 'debate-discuss' means "debate").

Some Chinese morphemes are polysyllabic; for example, the loanwords shāfā (沙发; 沙發; 'sofa') is the compound of shā (沙; 'sand') and fā (发; 發; 'to send', 'to issue'), but this compound is actually simply a transliteration of "sofa". Many native disyllabic morphemes, such as zhīzhū (蜘蛛; 'spider'), have consonant alliteration.^{[citation needed]}

Many monosyllabic words have alternative disyllabic forms with virtually the same meaning, such as dàsuàn (大蒜; 'big-garlic') for suàn (蒜; 'garlic'). Many disyllabic nouns are produced by adding the suffix zi (子; 'child') to a monosyllabic word or morpheme. There is a strong tendency for monosyllables to be avoided in certain positions; for example, a disyllabic verb will not normally be followed by a monosyllabic object. This may be connected with the preferred metrical structure of the language.