Understanding「向日葵總是心不在焉」

[feng]

A sentence in a comic im reading providing some difficulty understanding. How would you translate it?

[imron]

向日葵 means "sunflower" but in some translations of Tintin, it's also the name they've used for Professor Calculus (ie. in those versions, his name is Professor Sunflower")

The rest of the sentence is broken down as follows:

向日葵

總是

心不在焉

That should probably be enough to help you figure it out.

[feng]

Thanks! I appreciate you taking the time to respond!

I didn't realize the last four characters were part of a set phrase! (I also was having to guess "sunflower" was a person.)

[imron]

Interestingly enough, I also learnt that phrase via reading Tintin (but not from that panel), many years ago

[feng]

Makes sense. Given you have already done what I am trying to do, do you think having the english version side by side would be useful? Im not keen on it, but these sorts of phrases do slow me down a fair bit.

[imron]

No. What I found was that if I had the English nearby then I would start looking at the English "just to check" but then before long the "checking" would get longer and longer, and then I'd be so far ahead that I'd just think there was no point going back.

So my advice if you want to actually improve your Chinese rather than just reading a story, is to persevere with the chinese version.