Struggling with ともなく

Japanese
#1

I had to learn this today and to be honest it just made my head spin (more than most grammar).

First of all the explanation says

Verb [る] (A) + ともなく (1) + Verb [たら] (2) (A)

(1) ともなしに

(2)Verb + と

So my understanding is that this grammar point is するともなくしたら、 or するともなくすると, so the same verb is repeated twice. But one of the examples seems to contradict this;

話を聞くともなく、先生と黒板の方向をぼーっと見ていた。

It’s not clear to me why 聞く isn’t repeated here when the grammar point says the verb is repeated, and the verb is also repeated in other examples.

At the end it also says ともなく and ともなしに will often be seen in sentences that use たら. This puts emphasis on the specific time that something happened while performing another action absentmindedly. Despite translating this way, the action that precedes ともなく itself will be intentional, but the thing that comes about as a result of performing that action will not be what the doer was aiming to achieve.

So is the たら form only used in this situation?

Honestly I feel like someone needs to explain this whole grammar point to me like I’m 5. TIA

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#2

I have just had a read over the grammar explanation again, and do agree that it could certainly be made a bit more simple. Probably the best way to think of this is as two separate structures, where one is the main grammar point (ともなく), and the addition of ったら is just an emphatic version of the same thing. The difference would be -

(A)ともなく(B) = ‘I was doing (A) without too much thought, when (B)’

(A)ともなく+たら = It was when I was doing (A) without too much thought, that (B)’

The addition of たら just adds emphasis to a specific moment in time, where ともなく by itself is still functioning in a similar way to a conjunction grammatically, so also says ‘when’, it is just not presenting the moment in time as vital to the overall statement.

You could say that the verb attached to ともなく is a bit similar to ‘going about’ in English. As in ‘I was just going about doing the laundry where a police officer showed up at my front door’. The ‘going about’ is just putting emphasis that the person was intentionally doing the laundry, but they weren’t doing it in a way that they were actually expecting any kind of special result or outcome.

In the specific example that you gave - 話を聞くともなく、先生と黒板の方向をぼーっと見ていた。

It comes across that the person was intending on listening to what the teacher was saying, but actually he was just spacing out staring at the blackboard.

I hope this helps a bit!

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