English translation:
the more… the more
Structure:
Verb[ ば ] + Verb・ ほど
いAdj[ ば ] + いAdj・ ほど
Noun・であれば + Noun・ ほど
なAdj・ならば + なAdj + な・ ほど
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There’s an entry on this grammar point on A Dictionary of Intermediate Japanese Grammar, page 6. It’s written as ~ba ~hodo.
I can provide the screenshots or a transcription as needed. I think it’d be good to add it!
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Added!
Thanks 
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According to this video:
Noun・であれば + Noun・ほど
Can be reduced to just:
Noun・ほど
Also, you can substitute なら for ならば in
なAdj・ならば + なAdj + な・ほど
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Hi, I just came across the the sentence 「綺麗ならば綺麗なほど見続けたくなる」. I tried writing it as 「綺麗なら綺麗なほど見続けたくなる」 without adding the「ば」after 「なら」but my answer was graded incorrect. I’m not sure if I’m understanding it right but wouldn’t that be correct as well?
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@Pettchanashi
Hey 
You are absolutely right! I have added the answer.
Sorry for the inconvenience and thank you for the feedback,
Cheers
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Hello,
I just found this Tae Kim article precisely for this set pattern: http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/complete/more_amounts#Using_and_together - guess it’d be nice to add it in the readings list as well.
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@username2
Hey and welcome on the community forums 
I have added it, now there are two links to Tae Kim website
Thank you very much and Cheers!
PS
Super cute avatar
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Hi！According to Shin Kanzen Master N3, adjectives can take the forms as well:
なadj ＋な ＋ほど： 町がにぎやかなほど商店ではものがよくうれるのだ。
いadj ＋noun ＋ほど：忙しい人ほど時間の使い方がじょうずだ。
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Hey
You are right, the conditional part (ば・なら) can be omitted, I have added information about that to the grammar point.
Thank you and cheers
Not a question, but this is in Minna no Nihongo II, chapter 35 (page 62 in the grammar/English translations book), for anybody interested.
(the 1998 edition)
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Is it possible to change "ほど” in this, to say, "ぐらい”, or to use another conditional instead of “ば”？ I understand what the set phrase means and how to use it, but I don’t really understand exactly how it works. It doesn’t really bother me, I’m just curious。
No, you can’t use くらい.
You can also use たら.
Did you read the How does ほど work in the 〜すれば〜するほど construction? reading on the grammar point?
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I feel like a fool because I absolutely did skip over that whenever I first learned this point. Sorry about that, I feel like usually I’m able to remember to do that. It’s good to know that I can also use たら、thank you.
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instead of ば one can use たらright? For example 広ければ広いほどいい。->広かったら広いほどいい。Or is that only a Kansai thing?
I can’t seem to wrap my head around the “translation” of this grammar point.
When learning a new point, I tend to look at the “literal translation” of it as it helps me understand what the original meaning/feel of it when used in a sentence is, before memorising it as the english “localisation” if you will.
I’m struggling with this one.
Best transliteration I found so far was Tae Kim’s:
" 韓国料理は食べれば食べるほど、おいしくなる。
About Korean food, the more you eat the tastier it becomes.
The literal translation is, “About Korean food, if you eat, to the extent that you eat, it becomes tasty.” "
Anyone got similar example translations or alternative angles to look at the grammar point?
I think word-for-word translations sometimes add more problems than they solve. For a proper translation, you have to read the source material, understand it, and re-phrase it in the target language. A word-for-word translation basically defers the “understand” step and then you have understand the English words, but because they’re English and not Japanese, they sometimes don’t have the exact same meaning, and sometimes the grammar doesn’t work out at all and just becomes misleading, and sometimes you just forget that it’s not actually English and try to treat it according to how English works…
The word-for-word translation you gave actually already makes some concessions here. The “you” is not explicit in Japanese but it’s added in English. The “it” is not there in Japanese but it’s added in one spot in English. If we just translate the words it’d be more like “About Korean food, if eat, eat-extent, become-tasty” and that’s completely incomprehensible. Arguably, even the “if” is already making a concession (I’ll explain at the bottom because it’s completely unhelpful).
Anyway, maybe it helps to make the translation even less word-for-word in some other spots too. I’ll go over the translation and add some comments.
About Korean food
This is a pretty common way to translate は in this kind of translation. But we have to keep in mind that in English, this doesn’t automatically become a subject or object in following phrases.
In English we have to refer back to a topic with “it”. The phrase “if you eat” doesn’t mean the same thing as “if you eat it”. Arguably, the は is not fully translated here because its effect on following phrases is lost.
if you eat
Like ば in Japanese, “if” can express several things, such as hypotheses, or preconditions. Therefore, translation ば to “if” in a word-for-word translation should make sense.
In this case we have strong cause to suspect that the ば is specifically expressing a precondition. This is because in classical Japanese, the conjugation is different between hypothesis (using 未然形 for something that hasn’t happened yet or hasn’t started yet) and precondition (using 已然形 for something that has already happened or is already in progress), and if we research what ば…ほど is typically used with, it’s the 已然形 form as in 食へば食ふほど.
So if we consider the entire expression in Japanese, and not only the ば, we actually have knowledge that is lost in a word-for-word translation and that the English word-for-word translation does not represent anymore. We unfortunately deferred the “understand” part to after the information is lost, but maybe a different word could be used to make it easier, e.g. “when”.
to the extent that you eat
This is also one of those word-for-word translations where we pick one English translation and declare that the literal meaning of the word. Looking up ほど in a Japanese-English dictionary yields “extent” as the first definition, so we use “extent” as the primary meaning and use it for every ほど in every word-for-word translation.
I think “extent” kind of works here but looking up ほど in the 新和英大辞典 yields more options. Extent, degree, measure, limits, bounds, and a few more. We’re deferring the “understand” step, so we have to keep in mind that when we read “extent” now, it doesn’t *only" mean “extent”. It’s not necessarily the English word “extent” anymore.
The other thing is that we’re treating ほど as a noun here but the ほど in this expression is actually considered an “adverbial particle”. In a Japanese-Japanese dictionary, the definitions for ほど will generally match the words I listed above. In the noun section. But if we look in the 副助詞 section, this is different, and we might even find a definition specifically for the ば…ほど construction. For example, the 日本国語大辞典 offers につれてますます.
In other words, in Japanese this is not a noun expressing an extent, but an adverbial particle expressing a proportional change (in this expression). We could say that “extent” is straight up wrong even in a word-for-word translation because it does not have that meaning in the original Japanese. This specific 食べるほど’s literal meaning is “the more you eat [it]”.
it becomes tasty
This is basically the same comment as the previous one. The preceding ほど expresses a proportional change, but the word-for-word translation loses that information. The literal meaning of this part is “the tastier [it] becomes”.
And that’s the end, but I wrote that I’d explain why even the “if” is making a concession and making the translation less word-for-word in favour of making it more understandable.
Originally, ば is actually a rendaku’d topic particle は. What happened to translating は as “about”?
The form before it is the 仮定形 used for conditionals, but as I wrote above, in classical Japanese this expression used the 已然形 for something that has happened or is in progress. So an argument could be made that “About the process of eating” is also a reasonable literal translation of 食べれば when followed by 食べるほど. It might be more confusing though because nobody thinks of ば like that anymore.
Also, with this information, and in addition the information that ほど is adverbial, the “incomprehensible” word-for-word translation I gave at the top also becomes even more incomprehensible, maybe something along the lines of “About Korean food, about eating-in-progress, eat-extently, become tasty”.
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Hi everyone! I have a question regarding these two points:
（Noun + であ****れば ）+ である + ほど
And:
（［な］Adjective + であ****れば ）+ である + ほど
Am I missing something or there is no example sentences portraying this format? I don’t fully understand if it should be, for example, something along the lines of: 静かであればである程 OR if I’m missing something and it should be 静かであれば静かである程.
Can someone confirm if I need to repeat the noun/na adjective between であれば and である, please?
You can repeat it in the way that you did, but you don’t have to. If it’s not repeated it should be 静かであればあるほど without the で. The same applies to nouns too.
I see, thank you so much!! This makes more sense to me now.