Beginner here. I know that there are a few questions out there that deal with
disambiguating spoken Japanese (in a gist, the existing answers suggest that
you are able to disambiguate either based on context or pitch, or you avoid
disambiguaties altogether, by adding explanations or using other words).

I'm interested here in 2 concrete examples in this question, which are tricky
for me:

The first one is here (the other is in
[this](https://japanese.stackexchange.com/questions/72634/a-concrete-example-
of-problematic-disambiguation-part-2) question): "はし" which can mean chopstick
or bridge. A native Japanese that I have spoken to says that you can
disambiguate by pitch accent, but no matter how often I made him repeat "はし"
two times, where it was first meant to be "chopstick" and the second time
"bridge", I could not pick up auditively upon the difference; though he
insists there is one. Could it be that the difference is too subtle, and that
I simply need years of being exposed to the language in order to pick it up?
CC BY-SA 4.0
2019-10-20T17:19:18.180
72631
2019-10-21T05:59:31.913
2019-10-21T05:59:31.913
35777
35777
question
homophonic-kanji homonyms
A concrete example of problematic disambiguation (part 1)