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I am facing these two sentences:
Dann geht er ins Wohnzimmer.
The word order is: Verb, subject, … Clearly, the sentence is not a question.
The other sentence is:
Er macht den Fernseher an.
The word order is: Subject, verb, …
I want to know:
Though it is true that certain types of word order may be more frequent than others in any language, to include German, it is important to keep in mind that choices in word order can be made for several different reasons. Focusing on which word order is more popular may not convey what is truly intended. For example, sometimes conventions in grammatical structures require a certain word order; at other times, word order is changed for the purpose of emphasis.
However, the 'standard' word order (what you'll learn in school first) is: S-P-O (Subject-Predicate-Object)
Er geht ins Wohnzimmer.
Er macht den Fernseher an.
If you use main clauses only and don't wish to add any emphasis on any particular element of the sentence, you would use this word order only.
Er geht ins Wohnzimmer. Er macht den Fernseher an. Er setzt sich hin. Er schaltet um. Er schläft ein.
This is, obviously, not very thrilling. You can use conjunctions like dann (an adverbial conjunction, btw) to create a kind of connection between the actions. In this case, German grammar requires you to swap word order to P-S-O.
Erst geht er ins Wohnzimmer. Dann macht er den Fernseher an. Anschließend setzt er sich hin. Nach einiger Zeit schalter er um. Letztlich schläft er ein.
Still, this wouldn't be very sophisticated German, but it's a first step toward it.
Anyway, this is the reason why you're seeing a different word order in your sentence. There's no 'more popular' word order. You wouldn't use an adverbial conjunction in each and every sentence even if you could still maintain the S-P-O word order by moving that conjunction into the middle of the sentence.
Er geht erst ins Wohnzimmer. Er macht dann den Fernseher an.
The important things you have to remember:
To expand on Em1’s answer because I was bored, I did a word order count of one random long post of an Austrian on this site known for his long and detailed answers. I only counted main clauses.
The ‘standard’ subject-verb sentence, where subject is first, verb is second and I didn’t care what followed then, (SV_) occurred 23 times (including two sub-headers).
Pulling an adverbial, an apposition, or something else into first position, with verb following second (AdvVS_) occurred 8 times.
An object was pulled before the verb (OVS) 3 times.
A relative or otherwise subordinate clause occupied the first position two times, forcing ScVSO.
On one occasion, I noticed VSO outside of a question, although that is probably debatable and what I saw was truly a conditional subordinate clause. (Wird […], kann […] or something like that.)
Finally, having a conjunction in zero-position (ConjSV_) happened a mere 4 times.
So excluding the VSO special case, in 58 % of all cases the word order is subject — verb — object, which is what is taught at school and the expected word order most of the time. One could add the 10 % of cases where SVO is preceded by a conjunction.
In 32 % of cases, the word order is something — verb — subject, i.e. something was pulled into first position to emphasize it, which requires moving the subject to a position after the verb. (Some sentences didn’t include a subject in this construction. However, I didn’t include that into my considerations because I didn’t count the expletive sometimes present in SVO sentences either.)
But it’s much better to say that 90 % of all main clauses had the verb in second position, no matter what preceded it. The 10 % were the aforementioned zero-position conjunctions (Aber es gibt Ausnahmen).
68 % of the sentences in the sample had SVO, but 90 % followed V2 (meaning it didn't matter what preceded the verb, as long as there was something).
First of all, in German the position of the subject matters less than the position of the verb, because the latter is usually fixed while the former can move almost freely (however, e.g., not in questions). In both of your sentences, the verb is in the second position:
[Dann] geht [er] [ins Wohnzimmer].
[Er] macht [den Fernseher] an.
In a usual statement without special emphasis on a specific aspect, the subject would be in first position.
The most important difference between main and subordinate clauses in German is the position of the verbs. In a main clause (an independent sentence that can stand on its own feet), the conjugated verb is second and the main verb, if there is one, is at the end. By contrast, in a subordinate clause (a dependent sentence that provides additional information), the verbs are at the end with the conjugated verb being last. Of course, there are several different subordinate clauses in German, which make the whole thing more complicated. I therefore explain German word order in greater detail on my blog.
