Do you understand the title of this post?

Perhaps if I write it out so that it is free from the constraints of being a title, buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo. Still not sure? Here is a version with hyperlinks to the meaning of each word.

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.

Can’t be bothered to click on the links? I shall write an explanation: The first and last ‘buffalo’s in that sentence refer to the animal, the third one is the city and the second is North American slang meaning to confuse.

So the title of this post means ‘Buffalo confuse other buffalo from Buffalo, New York’.

Did I buffalo you there? I’m not clever enough to have thought of that by myself, I heard it on a radio show, hosted by the brilliant Stephen Fry, called Fry’s English Delight. The show went into detail about a number of interesting facets of the English language, usually about how it has developed over the years or fun bits of wordplay.

It was during the buffalo discussion that they mentioned how ‘had’ can be placed many times in a row in a sentence and it still makes sense grammatically. Despite my love of wordplay and puns I’ve never been able to get my head around that.

This kind of wordplay seems to exist in Japanese too. To me though it really seems to accentuate the fact that Japanese is almost impossible to read if you don’t use kanji. Take this as an example …

「はははははははのははははははとわらう」

Now in all fairness if you can’t read hiragana or katakana either it is pretty impossible to read Japanese as well. I shall romanise it for you, bare in mind that it loses something in translation here because “は” can be read in two different ways.

Haha wa haha haha no haha wa hahaha to warau

I remember when I showed some Japanese friends this and at first they were indeed buffaloed, I tried to explain the meaning using a mix of Japanese and English and despite the fact they had blank faces, they insisted they understood. I knew they weren’t telling me the whole truth, maybe not to hurt my feelings or something, I’ve noticed Japanese people do this a lot.

So I persisted and showed them the same sentence written in kanji:

「母はハハ母の母はハハハと笑う」

The look on their faces was priceless, the moment they realised the meaning of the sentence their moods changed and it was all thanks to the kanji. Due to the lack of spaces in Japanese, having kanji to break up the sentence really is necessary to get any meaning out of a block of text. Now it is easy to tell that the sentence means a mother is laughing over the other laughing mums.

Here is another, to do with gardens:

「にわにはにわにわとりがいる」

or:

Niwa niwa niwa niwatori ga iru.

Add the magic kanji and you get:

「庭には二羽鶏がいる」

So now you know the kanji you can easily decipher that this sentence means that two chickens are in the garden. Which can be a very important piece of information depending on the situation.

Kanji does appear to be a bit of a double edged sword though. Due to the vast amount of possible readings each one has, Japanese is the only language where I have seen grown adults have an argument about how to correctly read a sentence.

As I have said before, kanji are pictograms that represent things. While studying some recently I noticed that certain animal kanji does indeed look like the animal it represents.

Here is the kanji for horse, look at it’s glorious mane.

Here is the one for bird, a big beak can plainly be seen.

Fish looks about right too, ready to be turned into sushi for a hungry salary man.

It would be great if it worked with all kanji but unfortunately that is not the case. Most animal kanji looks like it is just a few squiggles.

Talking about kanji that look like animals, I have noticed that just about every kanji on display in the gym looks like an elephant.

Here is an elephant having a quick sit down. He must be tired from all that exercise.

While he does that his mates have a quick walk to the shops.

I lied about not making any other vlogs.

Something I’ve noticed is that since moving to Japan I have been fairly bad at keeping up with the news. Sure, I look at the BBC website but often my time there is spent on the sport pages.

I am a keen listener of the World Football Phone-In (sports again) and one person on there, Tim “The Legendinho” Vickery, mentioned that a great way to discover a nation’s culture and learn a language is to watch the news broadcasts. Unfortunately other than a brief flirtation, I have yet to watch Japanese news programmes seriously.

Unfortunately my main sources of news these days are social media websites like Twitter and Facebook. I tend to only follow people with similar interests to me or my friends and as a result the news I get from it is rather skewed. If my Twitter feed is to be believed, the most important bit of news recently was that Stephen Fry may or may not have been misquoted when making some silly comments about women.

One morning I turned on my computer to check what has been happening around the world via the twittersphere and found this picture:

THIS IS HUGE NEWS!

I bet this earth shattering story is being ignored by the traditional media but to me it is the biggest news of the year, almost 20 years in the making.

Let me explain, when I was about 7 or 8 years old, I went to France and the vast amount of the holiday was taken up by sitting in the back seat of the car while going up hills. The one thing that did stick with me though was the cereal I found. It’s name was Chocapic and it was delicious. Unlike other chocolate cereals it does not loose it’s crunch.

The story of the rest of my life has basically consisted of trying to get hold of it again. It was unavailable in the UK and I longed for it so much. When I would go to other countries one of the first things I would do would be to see if it was on sale there. Over the course of my travels I found out that it was sold in mainland Europe, Latin America and oddly, China.

Just after university I had finally found a dealer, my house mate’s mother’s friend made regular trips to France on business and my house mate had somehow managed to convince him to return with a box of the chocolatey goodness. So I would eagerly await my house mate’s trips back to his home town because he would comeback with a box or two. Unfortunately there was an unhappy ending to this story, my house mate’s sister, who still lived with her mother, intercepted the boxes and after discovering how delicious there were, refused to let my house mate take them from her. So my supply was cut off.

So fast forward again to the other day and that picture. That picture was confirmation that Chocapic is finally on sale in the UK. For the first time since I arrived in Japan, I wish I was back home in England. Chocapic is not available in Japan and I very much doubt that people here will see the light and follow the British lead, there are no Nestle cereals sold in Japan.

If you live in the UK please seek this stuff out, you won’t regret it.