帰ってくる is triggering me

Coming across this a lot in my graded reader and it’s annoying me… what does てくる add?

  • to return home and to come
  • to come to return home
  • to return home

why not just say 帰る - to return home?

私が帰ってくるまで

Until I come to return home… could you just say 私が帰るまで until I return home

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I think it’s like “Until I have [come to the point that] I have gone home.” I’ve never really thought about it, it’s one of those weird ones that just started coming out naturally after a while…

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I would be confused as well

Also some sentences I think is really odd the way they are made like this one

だんだんと あのやつのこときらいになってきていて、いまけるようにしている。」

the きていて part :crazy_face:

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Maybe the easiest way to think about it is to pretend that ‘to home’ 帰る is also a verb in Japanese… Like a homing pigeon or a homing missile haha. Then just pretend the くる ‘come’, adds the ‘come home’ nuance that we have in English.

くる and いく themselves quite often just have a time based nuance. いく means when the verb is being initiated/started, くる means when the verb has come to an end (most of the time). So in this case, 帰る by itself is not actually so specific.

Think of 私が帰るまで as ‘until I head home’ (implies leaving for home), not ‘until I return home’ (implies arriving at home)

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In conversation, Japanese are always ‘coming’ and ‘going’ where it seems unnecessary in English.
いってきます!
– literal: I’ll go and come [back]!
– natural: I’m leaving!
ご飯を買ってくるね。
– literal: I’ll buy food and come [back]
– natural: I’m going to buy food

I would also add that it creates a feeling of action that it’s happening soon, instead sometime in the distant future.
私が帰ってくるまで
– you’re probably returning today or tomorrow (you can picture it happening)
私が帰るまで
– you could be returning next year (it’s harder to picture it exactly)

I like these pictures of past and future with time flow:
https://www.wasabi-jpn.com/japanese-grammar/helping-verbs/


ps. There’s several ‘add-on’ structures that add an extra feeling to verbs in Japanese: ~てしまう、~てくれる、~てあげる、~てもあう
In English, you’d just say “my friend went to the airport [to pick me up]”. But in Japanese, it’s better to say 「友達が空港に行ってくれました」to show you appreciate that your friend went to the airport.

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That chart (and other variations by other websites) sits fondly in my mind, one of my first “a-ha!!!” moments when learning the language and a lesson I still think about every now and again.

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To add on to what others have said, 帰る by itself is only non past and therefore not particularly time specific. Adding the って来る adds immediacy to it. I also imagine that there is so phrasal and semantic drift from 行って来る and 持って来る.

edit: Semantic not somatic lol.

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