On italki I received a response to one of my notebook entries. I have trouble understanding what this person said to me xD
For more context, you can see the full entry including all comments here: https://www.italki.com/notebooks/817607
The sentence in question is this one: 先に問いに対する答えを明確にした方がよりわかりやすい回答になると思います。 このお話は、『饅頭こわい』ですか?
I feel a bit unsure about the sentence as a whole, but I struggle the most with the part in bold. I have quite some trouble with 明確にした方. Especially 方 gives me a headach since I'm a bit clueless on how to meaningfully interprete it in context of the phrase it is embedded into. I think I might have seen a similar construction elsewhere The fact that it's followed by が and then directly by より makes the riddle even harder for me. Unless for the case that より means "from", I only know it in context of comparisons.
In these contexts it usually doesn't directly succeed the subject marker. It should look more like this: この饅頭はそのチョコレートよりおいしい。=> "These manju are more delicious than that chocolate." (I hope I did this correctly, Im terrible at comparisons...^^)。It could as well be 方が, as in そうしたほうがいいです. But then the following より still irritates me.
My translation so far looks like this:
"The answer regarding the question before the made precise manner がより becomes an easy to understand reply I think. Is this the "I fear manju" story?"
As you can see I cant get through that middle section of the sentence. It doesn't even begin to make sense. I might know the 明確にした方 from similar structures like here Feeling unsure about the connection of the two sides of the comma "地図は普通、北を上にして掛かれる"
But as I said Im kind of clueless on this. I'm just guessing at this point