I was watching Saekano and I came across a this text message that one of the characters sent. The problem is, I have almost no clue about what it’s trying to say. Any help?
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そっち行けるの後夜祭の時間になりそう。
後片付けだけ参加するからって、クラスの皆に謝っておいて
It seems I can only make it there around the time of the closing party. Please say sorry to everyone from the class, I will join for the cleaning up.
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Thanks a lot! Like really, thanks, because you can’t use google translate or anything similar for these types of sentences, so asking someone with a better knowledge of Japanese feels like the only way to actually be able to understand.
If you (or someone else) don’t mind, could you help me understand it a bit more?
The translation helps a lot, but still don’t really fully get it. I understand all the words but what does “行けるの” mean here? Why the の after a verb, I don’t think I’ve ever seen that. Also, what does 時間になる mean?
In the second sentence, what does the からって mean? Jisho translates it as “ just because; even if; even though”, but I don’t see how that fits in.
I mean, you can, you just have to type it in yourself. At your level, you can probably read, or know how to look up a reading, for most everything, no?
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I’m glad it helped!
の is the nominaliser. It turns a clause (そっちに行ける, to be able to go there(close to listener)) into a noun (the fact of being able to go there). There’s an omitted は here, which could still be marked by a comma ” 、” but that’s optional as well.
って is just the quotation marker と indicating what the reader is supposed to say to the others (that the speaker will join for clean up)
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I typed it in, and it gave me absolute garbage. That’s the only reason I asked you guys to help me.
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Ah, I see what you meant. It’s google translate though, so that’s the operating expectation, no? 
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Yeah but usually you expect it to at least give you a part of the meaning. With these two sentences, I become more confused after using google translate.
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Right, it contains a lot of implicit and casual speech, both things that are understandably really hard for a machine to pick up…
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Thanks for the explanation. Last question, I swear 
With the って, I see how that makes sense now. Just wondering though, what’s the point of the から then? Is it just “because”?
In that case, can the second sentence be translated as: “Apologize to the class for me because I will only be able to come for the clean up.”?
This one doesn’t seem to have been covered:
Basically, “(when) it becomes time”
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Ah, not exactly. The から is “because”, but it’s not the end of the message, the main clause has been dropped/made implicit. Since the speaker wants to apologize, and based on the context, we can infer that it’s something around the line of 許してください (please forgive me).
→ 後片付けだけ参加するから、許して “please forgive me, because I will help with the clean up after (anyway)”.
All of that is then put behind a と as the apology that must be transmitted to everyone from class.
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Thank you so much for the explanation.
Everyone says casual Japanese is so much easier than formal Japanese, but at least for me, I don’t see how its that much easier because it has a ton of nuances that are hard to pick out sometimes, like this one.
I can guarantee that if the text message was sent in formal Japanese then I would be able to understand pretty much everything (since the vocab wasn’t an issue), but because its casual, and I have almost 0 experience with that, I could barely make out what was said initially.
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Once in a while, there’s a heated discussion about that on the forum, especially about dictionary form versus masu form.
At the end of the day, I think neither is harder than the other, it’s just knowing what rules you have to apply to parse the sentence. The problem is that there’s a disproportionate amount of sources focusing on formal rather than casual, especially at the beginner~intermediate level, so it’s harder to get accustomed to the casual side.
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