Word order/ order of words

Hi Joseph

One example I listened too recently was …

Há já vários dias que estou a tentar falar contigo…

Comparing to english, its back to front… its been several days, I am trying to speak to you… (loosely)

In English it would be “I have been trying to speak to you for several days…”

So its not just a simple grammatical move of adjectives etc. its like swapping two of the sentence clauses around… so I wondered if there were rules for this… or is this just a colloquial example…