美味しそうに食べるね - Translation clarification

Japanese
#1

I’m watching a movie and the sentence 美味しそうに食べるね came up. Just from context, and common sense I believed it to mean something like “You seem like you’re enjoying the food!”.

However, I’m not really understanding the grammar construction, more specifically the use of に in this case. The best way I can conceptualize it is that the act of eating, 食べる, is in the “direction” of 美味しそう, looking delicious. However, I’m not sure if this is correct. Could anyone give me a more formal answer?

Some example sentences might be:
眠そうに起きる
だるそうに働く

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#2

美味しそう is a na-adjective, the adverbial form ends with に.

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#3

This に turns the preceding な-adjective 美味しそう into an adverb. I’ve seen it described as an inflectional ending (the equivalent to -ly in English), or alternatively as the adverbial form of the copula だ.

If English could do this too, the translation might be “eating tasty-seeming-ly”. Basically, eating like every Japanese person on TV ever :stuck_out_tongue:

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#4

Boom. Easy enough. Thanks for the quick easy answer.

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#5

Thanks. It’s painfully obvious now. Appreciate the quick replies!

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