[grzm]

I would think the parent is referring to unambiguous in terms of pronunciation. You're right in that you wouldn't know which character was originally used in isolation—or whether kanji was used at all.

As far as I know, there's little (any?) pitch accent that distinguishes between words in Japanese. What pitch accent are you referring to?

[emodendroket]

Every word in Japanese has a standard pitch accent and some otherwise homophonous ones differ in pitch accent. However, from one dialect to another the pitch accents on the same word can be totally different so I don't think they're usually a big hindrance to communication. Pitch accent differs from English stress accent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_pitch_accent

[grzm]

To be clear, you're saying that pitch can change due to regional accent, as opposed to distinguish between homophones, which is which is what 'singhblom was implying, correct?

I thought 花 and 鼻 were ambiguous … yet the pitch accent differs. No?

[emodendroket]

It does both things. Pitch accent is the only thing distinguishing some homophones (hana, hasi, ame, kumo) but it's also got variation in dialects including a handful where the Tokyo and Osaka versions have the same distinction between two words except with the opposite meaning (sorry, I don't have examples off the top of my head).

Fortunately there aren't that many sentences where it's equally plausible you meant both spider and cloud.

[grzm]

Interesting. Admittedly not a native speaker, I never found pitch accent used to distinguish between homophones during my time in Japan, nor was it introduced in any of the courses I took on Japanese while I was there, including the examples you provide.

[emodendroket]

I majored in Japanese and it wasn't really seriously introduced until I studied in Japan and I'd already been studying Japanese for three years. But while not learning it won't hinder your ability to communicate too much it can help you sound more natural. NHK publishes a dictionary of pitch accent in standard Tokyo dialect: https://www.amazon.co.jp/NHK-%E6%97%A5%E6%9C%AC%E8%AA%9E%E7%...

[grzm]

Thanks for the reference! Could I trouble you to provide an example from that text that describes such a homophone (as opposed to regional dialect) distinction?