[Riverheart]

Spoken Japanese, in my very limited experience, runs into this issue due to the number of homophones and the only recourse are context clues to distinguish their meaning. So there can be ambiguity in an otherwise functional language, although it certainly makes it harder.

[xelxebar]

True, though native speakers do distiguish a good swath of "homophones" by differing pitch accent---e.g. in the standard dialect あめ means "rain" if the pitch drops on め or "candy" if it stays level. To a native speaker, these sound as different as the two ways of saying "present".

If you grab a native Japanaese dictionary that has accent indicators, like 新明解国語辞典, there really are surprisingly few true homophones in a typical vocabulary.

[Riverheart]

Interesting. Thank you for this.