“kaeru” is Japanese for frog…
When you spell it out in the Japanese alphabet, hiragana, it’s ka-e-ru. There are about 50 hiragana “letters”, which function like syllables and they’re always pronounced the same no matter how they’re combined. Compare that to English, which uses about 15,000 syllables! That makes Japanese very simple in one sense, but it also severely limits the richness of words that it’s possible to build.
And that means that kaeru means frog, and to go home, and to be able to buy, and to change, and a few others that are a little more obscure. So if you wanted to say, “The frog that I change (maybe I’m a wizard, I dunno) can buy a(nother) frog that I change, and so it will go home” that becomes:
KAERU KAERU ga KAERU KAERU wo KAERU kara, KAERU
Reminds me of “buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo“…
Thanks Shiina for ever-interesting Nihongo classes!
Two Years of Sushi 