Question about chapter 1

[Jonathan]

Even though I didn't mind eating alone, I didn't want others to think that I was a loner when everyone else was happily eating their lunch with their friends. That's why, even though I didn't care if others misunderstood, I ate my lunch together with my junior high school classmate Kunikida and an East Junior High graduate named Taniguchi, who sat close to me.

We started to talk about Haruhi.

"Did you try to talk to Suzumiya?" Taniguchi asked innocently. I nodded.

"And then she said some weird stuff and you didn't know how to react?"

"That's right!"

Taniguchi put his sliced boiled egg into his mouth, chewed, and said:

"If that girl is interested in you, she wouldn't say weird stuff like that. All I can advise you is to give up! You should know by now that she's not normal.

"I was in her class three years in a row; I know how she is."

He used this line as the beginning of his speech.

"She always does incredibly baffling things. I thought she would at least try to control herself after she got into senior high; apparently she hasn't. You heard her introduction speech, right?"

"You mean the alien stuff?"

Kunikida, who was busy picking bones out of his fried fish, butted in:

"Yeah that. Even back in junior high she always said and did lots of weird stuff. For example there was this school vandalization incident!"

"What happened?"

"You know that one tool where you use plaster dust to draw field lines, right? What's it called... Anyway, she sneaked into school at night and, with that thing, drew a huge huge symbol in the middle of the field."

Kyon says that Kunikida was his classmate in junior high school, but how come Kunikida knows Haruhi's behavior in junior high if he was with Kyon in another school? o-o

[Dan]

Well, Kunikida and Taniguchi already seem to know each other. It's entirely possible they were friends during junior high and Taniguchi just told Kunikida about it.

[Jonathan]

Probably you are right lol xD but he says it in a way as if he was there when it happened

[the_naming_game]

Japanese seems to have a lot of instances where the dialogue attribution comes after the dialogue -- even for long passages, say in ch6. So here's how it should read:

"You mean the alien stuff?" (Kunikida)

Kunikida, who was busy picking bones out of his fried fish, had butted in.

"Yeah that. Even back in junior high she always said and did lots of weird stuff. For example there was this school vandalization incident!" (Taniguchi)