To your point I came across this a moment ago: https://selftaughtjapanese.com/2014/03/19/research-results-homophones-in-japanese/ https://selftaughtjapanese.com

To your point I came across this a moment ago: https://selftaughtjapanese.com/2014/03/19/research-results-homophones-in-japanese/ https://selftaughtjapanese.com/2014/03/19/research-results-h... While there are a ridiculous amount of homophones (top 3 are 45, 38, 31!), it does look like the total number of words that include them is at 3.4%, increasing outside of daily language as you step into more specific topics. Not exactly small, but not as dramatic as I had pictured either. English apparently has 7-15% depending on what you reference by comparison. The biggest difference is that while they are individual words in English, they are only word components in Japanese, which is why I'd say it's arguably harder. Not impossible of course, children are taught with spaced out hiragana at first, eventually learning the more compact non-spaced version of the language as they incorporate more kanji to help with word boundaries.