Words that sound exactly the same?

[brandonwee]

Is the word tea (茶) and the second word in police (察) pronounced the same way? Cha2? If yes, do things like this cause misunderstandings? Or it's really no issue?

[imron]

The word 'stare' and the word 'stair' are pronounced exactly the same way in English, and yet it's unlikely that this will ever cause confusion in spoken language because the context is usually enough to differentiate them. The same is true of Chinese. For example, you will never ask for a pot of policemen at a restaurant, nor will you call for tea if you're being robbed (although you might call for it afterwards to soothe your nerves if you're British).

So although there's generally little/no cause for confusion, having so many words that are pronounced similarly does make the language ripe for puns.

[c_redman]

Also, many characters, including 察, aren't commonly used by themselves. It would be 观察 (inspect), 考察 (inspect), or 警察 (police), and so on. There are still multisyllabic homonyms, but a lot less than for single characters. This, along with context, eliminates a lot of ambiguity.

Speaking of multisyllabic words, these are an example of the words that I always have trouble telling apart, as a non-native speaker. Most of them have different tones or slightly different pronunciation, so they wouldn't confuse a native speaker. But they require a lot more mental processing on my part to differentiate.

切实 qie4 shi2 /feasible/earnestly/conscientiously/realistic/practical/

确实 que4 shi2 /indeed/really/reliable/real/true/

同意 tong2 yi4 /to agree/to consent/to approve/

同一 tong2 yi1 /identical/the same/

统一 tong3 yi1 /to unify/to unite/to integrate/

转播 zhuan3 bo1 /relay/broadcast (on radio or TV)/

传播 chuan2 bo1 /to disseminate/to propagate/to spread/

反应 fan3 ying4 /to react/to respond/reaction/response/reply/chemical reaction/

反映 fan3 ying4 /to mirror/to reflect/mirror image/reflection/fig. to report/to make known/to render/

老实 lao3 shi5 /honest/sincere/open and guileless/naive/

老是 lao3 shi5 /always/

[Demonic_Duck]

察 isn't the second word in 警察, it's the second character. Your question is less like asking if English people mix up "stare" and "stair", and more like asking if English people mix up the word "tea" and the "-ty" in "treaty".

Although the concept of words isn't quite as clear-cut in Chinese as it is in English, thinking of single characters as words will hinder your learning in the short term (in the long term it's simply an unsustainable illusion, but the quicker you drop it, the better).

Of course, as the others mentioned, there are also entire words (whether single- or multi-character) that are homophones, for example 要是 "if" and 钥匙 "key". But these aren't problematic in context, any more than the homophones that exist in English (that is, in rare cases certain sets of homophones can cause ambiguity, as in puns, but this rarely happens in normal situations).

[count_zero]

A: 中国人不喜欢什么茶？

B: 警察

喝茶 is a euphemism for a police interview. I presume because it's homophonous with 核查.

Mandarin has a dearth of morphemes compared with English. Yes, this can definitely cause problems for learners.

[tooironic]

As a fluent Mandarin speaker I can tell you that words sounding exactly the same rarely cause misunderstandings in day to day conversations - at least for me. More commonly, I misunderstand what is being said because the speaker has a heavy (often southern) accent. Just the other day one of my friends kept saying jiānzi and I had no idea what he meant. Turns out he meant jiānzhí (兼职). This is just one example of many - I've also had trouble with cēzi (they meant chēzi 车子), sēngrè (they meant shēngri 生日), and so on. Suffice to say I need more practice talking to southerners who don't/can't speak standard Mandarin. But I don't think homonyms in Mandarin per se are a massive problem. I also agree with Demonic_Duck that 察 in 警察 is not a word, but a part of the word for "police", so the possibility for confusion in this case is very slight.

[li3wei1]

I've found quite a few word pairs that sound exactly the same, and could both be used in the same context (but I'm working with English definitions, and maybe there are nuances I don't understand). For example:

无礼: rude

无理: irrational

both could be used to describe someone's speech or behaviour, yes?

edited to put back the second word which had mysteriously vanished.

[brandonwee]

察 isn't the second word in 警察, it's the second character.

Yes, I meant character, sorry.

[David Wong]

#7, in those cases, most people I know would say 没有礼貌，or 没有道理 not just to avoid the ambiguity, but that's the more common spoken form anyway.

[xiaocai]

无理 normally is used in set phrases like 无理取闹 or 无理要求, rarely used alone, at in mainland Chinese. I guess that also helps avoid ambiguity.

[navaburo]

A dictionary will lead you to believe that the homophone situation in Chinese is much worse than it is in the daily spoken reality.

Many of the homophones are used primarily in writing where they are disambiguated by the distinct characters, as in the wu2li3 case given above. But nonetheless, written mandarin may be read aloud and understood.

Now, if you read classical Chinese aloud, you will NOT be understood due to the greater frequency of homophones there.

[c_redman]

Here is a timely post that discusses some of the same issues: Laowai Chinese » Out of the Blue Vocab Trap. To sum up, Chinese also sometimes have trouble with similar sounding words, especially if there isn't enough context.

[lingo-ling]

考績 - assessment/appraisal (of performance)

烤雞 - roast/grilled chicken

[imron]

See also this joke.

[li3wei1]

Here's another:

烦琐: tedious/convoluted/fiddly/pedantic

繁琐: many and complicated/mired in minor details

Same pronunciation, same part of speech, and the meaning is close enough that it's highly probable that one could replace the other. Now, it may be true that in 口语 you'd find other ways to say both of these things that wouldn't be ambiguous, but the fact that you have to is interesting. What if you're writing something that is intended for performance, like a speech? Or reading out loud something that was written?

I can't think of anything like this in English: two words that sound exactly the same and that could replace each other in most sentences in which they occur.

[imron]

On the other hand, if you look in a Chinese-Chinese dictionary under 烦琐, it says: 现在一般写作“繁琐”。So in some ways it's more like jail and gaol. The same word, but just a different spelling, with one of the spellings generally favoured over the other.

[jade-]

There are many Chinese characters/words having same pronouncations even same tones, in most cases, we don't misunderstand each other during the conversations, but occassionally we do need the other party to clarify which word he/she said.

@lingo-ling:考绩and 烤鸡, the last words have different tones so it is not very easy to get confused.

[OneEye]

@lingo-ling:考绩and 烤鸡, the last words have different tones so it is not very easy to get confused.

Not in Taiwan.

[lingo-ling]

社經 - socioeconomic

射精 - to jizz

[roddy]

We know the homophones exist, the discussion was about how much of a problem it is...

Like

, perhaps. Rarely, but much more frequently in jokes.