> Japanese, to my elementary-level ear, doesn't sound an order of magnitude more ambiguous than English I don't have any citations, but subjectively I disagree

> Japanese, to my elementary-level ear, doesn't sound an order of magnitude more ambiguous than English I don't have any citations, but subjectively I disagree. One can think of English words that are homophones, but in JP the challenge is more to think of words that aren't. On one hand, if you include uncommon words (as a keyboard's corpus would) then practically any medium-length word will have multiple possibilities, which is not the case in English. But much more important is that, where an English homophone typically has two or possibly three interpretations, a kanji jukugo might have 3-4 everyday meanings and a bunch more uncommon ones. And all this is on top of the matter of word boundaries. If the user enters し, there could be 10+ possible transliterations of that character as a standalone word/particle, above and beyond whatever readings are possible together with the characters before and after. So I don't know what an order of magnitude would mean in this context, but I think the whole matter is significantly more ambiguous than English.