How often do homonyms cause confusion?

13 comments

1. Wait until you learn かける and かかる 🙂

   Most homonyms can be understood from context as well as different pitch accent.

2. Alot, words like あつい, あつい, あつい

3. >How often do homonyms cause confusion?

   Almost never because the meaning is obvious from the context. You can’t get confused if you’re paying attention to the person you’re talking to.

4. Do homonyms ever cause confusion for english native speakers?

   I haven’t had trouble in either language, in my personal experience. Context usually provides the answers you need to understand which one is being used.

5. English has a ton of homonyms, and words with a large number of meanings — look up things like “get”, “set”, and “run”.

   The answer is basically never. This is a problem for foreign learners, not native speakers.

6. Kanji are a lifesaver when reading. しめる should be written as 占める、湿る、締める、閉める and 絞める for the first group respectively, making it perfectly clear what it actually means. That’s why I don’t get people who avoid learning them. It’s much easier to learn kanji than to deal with this homonym insanity.

   As for listening, it just sucks. Context helps a lot, but you need to have a much better knowledge of words. One you do, comprehension is automatic.

7. They’re mostly used for puns and double entendres

8. I think the subject or object of a sentence can basically determines which words the speaker means.

   The owner can’t strangle the restaurant but he can close the restaurant.
   One reason can’t close 50% of the whole, but it can account for 50% of the whole 🙂

9. I’m currently at the stage where I’m just starting to find out the multiple meanings. It’s throwing me off completely because I think I understand the word at first, then I see two others and wonder if I’m still using it right.

   準備、支度、用意 prepare
   計画、つもり、予定 plan

   These are some of my more recent ones. Blows my mind 🙁

10. Very rarely.

11. not really except when I was just starting it confused me a lot more because I didn’t have much context to draw from when I was reading things

12. Well, which well is well filled?

13. They do cause confusion to a certain extent when speaking, and the answer Japanese people have come up with over the centuries is that 1) they avoid using homophones, whenever possible, and 2) they rely on context and hope to figure out what others are trying to say.

    1. is tricky because not always you can substitute a word for another. Often times you can, especially kanji compounds with their 和語 counterparts. For example, a few days ago I was watching an anime where a character says 爆弾犬, read ばくだんげん, a few seconds before entering a kennel. How many speakers would have figured out that げん was a rendaku from けん, which referred to dogs (on reading of 犬)? A lot, but a lot of them probably didn’t. So in real life a person would instead have said something along of the lines of 爆弾の犬. I’ve noticed that Japanese has a tremendous amount of synonyms, much more than English and other European languages, but the thing is, often times those synonyms are homophones of common words, like 攻勢, which has almost a dozen homophones, and it’s a synonym of 攻撃, so the less common synonym is rarely used in speech. In real life you’d be hard pressed to find someone use 攻勢, precisely because they know how many damn homophones こうせい has, and also because 攻撃 is naturally more common.

    So in a nutshell: yes, homophones are a much bigger problem in Japanese than in most other languages. And yes, Japanese people have come up with ways to deal with them over the centuries, to a point where they are not nearly as problematic as they might appear at first glance.