The “for me” translation is extremely helpful there, thank you a bunch.
So then, this sentence is very literally:
「おかげさまで [ウチが 行商に来るの]を [楽しみに待ってくれてる お客さん ]が、だいぶ [増えてきた]んですよ」
“Thanks to you, [[I come to peddle] AS NOUN]を [guest that are waiting with anticipation for me]が, greatly [multiplied and came]んですよ”.
So would a more idiomatic but still literal translation be “Thanks to you, the [guest that are waiting with anticipation for me] greatly [multiplied and came] to [my peddling visits], you see!”
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The “for me”, while being useful in isolation, actually obscures the meaning of the sentence. The customers aren’t waiting “for me”, they are waiting for ウチが行商に来る. It’s just that the speaker sees this waiting as being for them, hence the くれる. てくれる - Japanese Grammar Explained | Bunpro
増えてきた doesn’t mean “multiplied and came”. First, I think “to increase” is a better meaning for 増える in this case. Second, the きた means more that it became that way, not that they came. So it became that the number of waiting customers increased greatly. If it helps, you can think of it as “it came to be” instead of “it became”. てくる - Japanese Grammar Explained | Bunpro
Maybe because it becomes that way gradually? I’m not sure I can confidently answer that question. Hopefully someone else can give a good explanation for that.
This may not answer your question as to why the language evolved as it did, but てくる is very common as marking a change leading up to the present time, as is ていく to mark change from now and leading into the future.
I’m not aware of なる being used this way at all. Rather I’d use なる with adverbs (such as 大きくなった or 大きくなれるかな) and てくる and ていく with verbs.
Thanks to your help (1), there are many more (5) guests (4) who are excitedly waiting (3) for me to come peddle. (2)
This is my take at it. Generally, くれる is used for indicating that the speaker sees the action either as a favor or as otherwise beneficial to them (either literally or sometimes sarcastically).
てくる has a few different uses in Japanese, but one is “has____” (past-perfect). The number of expectant customers “has increased.” You’re highlighting that something took place in the past, but is still relevant to its current state. (On the other hand, if you just used basic past-tense–増えた–does it it mean you still have more customers? Who knows.) The nuance is fairly similar to English, and there’s some wiggle room for when you’d use a plain た vs. てきた. Generally the latter highlights the change, or clarifies its continued relevance where that might be in question.
Affirmative verbs don’t link directly to なる. They need an intermediary like ように. In general, only potential forms are ever linked to なる. (Because if you think about it, they’re the only thing that makes sense with it. You wouldn’t say “become increasing” or “became increased” in English either.)
Translation suggestions, anyone? Does it make sense for なる to have an imperative form? Because unless the sentence is talking to the iron (“Iron! Become hot!”), I can’t work out what なれ means, but if the sentence is talking to the iron, then I can’t work it what 叩いて means.
But the issue then becomes the 叩いて. Even if I assume it’s implied to be imperative because the main verb is, it’s still transitive - if I read it as the iron is the subject of なれ, it still has to be the object of 叩いて, so “be struck” won’t work for a translation.
(Bleh, I so want to just give up and translate this as “strike while the iron is hot”, except that’s 鉄は熱いうちに打て)
Unfortunately, this is a title, so there’s no context to be had. The only context I can offer is that the titles in this series tend to be, but aren’t always, puns on song titles or proverbs.
That’s basically what I was figuring, but it just doesn’t flow off the tongue, ya know?
Nah, they rarely invoke the title itself in the episodes, though there was one week when the title was the title of a song, which the main character played in the last day. But yeah, I’ll be translating them next. Just focusing on the opening credits at the moment.
