chapotraphouse

I have been leaning it 你好:p So i am no expert but i can say that it does have a similar order to things. The characters are not words though but more like chunks of meaning. Like Ni is you and Hao is good. So it translated to hello, but the 2 sections mean you good. Similar to how you can break an english word down like UN-EXPECT-ED each of those sections would be its own character in chinese.

Pinyin is the easy way to learn it. It uses the alphabet we are used to to represent the phonetic sounds of the language. So 你好 is nihao and when you use a program to type pinyin it will turn the pinyin into characters for you.

So while you can generally do things in the same order be careful when editing things not to break up character groups. You might end up breaking your sentence. Also be careful if you use pinyin to make sure you get the right character as the same word in a different tone can have a different character and different meaning.