Lord help me, I cannot figure out this one puzzle sentence/grammar exercise (並び替え問題 ) … help!

2 comments

1. On r/translator it’s not a good idea for us to just give you the answer, but I’m not sure what the policy/good practice guidelines are in this sub.

   Any chance you have an idea of what the resulting sentence is going to mean?

2. One thing that helps me is to group the words/phrases that seem likely to go together.

   For example, children are humans that have yet to mature, so 子どもの成長に seems like a good start.

   Then, せまい (“small, cramped”) is often said of rooms or houses, so 自宅がせまく also seems good.

   ともない is the verb stem of 伴う (“to accompany; to follow”). As you’ve pointed out, ともない often follows 〜に, but which one? Well 〜にともない is used to describe an action or event that happens concurrently with another (“as X, Y.”). Specifically, it refers to an event/action that happens gradually. So which one of the words we’ve got denotes some gradual change? That would be 子どもの成長に.

   Out of what we’ve figured out already, we can get a meaningful part of the answer: 子どもの成長にともない、自宅がせまく (lit. “As a child grows, my house gets smaller…”).

   Now the last phrases we have are ように、感じられる、なってきた. We can more or less see where this is going: 感じられるようになってきた。

   Putting them in order we get:

   子どもの成長にともない、自宅がせまく感じられるようになってきた。

   Hope this helps