That sounds like the perfect time to go “citation needed.” Because there’s absolutely zero evidence of that.
Anyway, in reality, even words that still have the same pitch accent are rarely going to cause problems. It’d take a sentence like はははははる（母は歯張る) to create a serious issue. Just like in English, “The night the knight went out to meet the meat bear he couldn’t bear it so instead red a read book.” doesn’t present a serious issue. It’s the same way in Japanese. You’ll have far bigger issues with confusing words like 思う and 申す
Ah that sucks. Works fine for me in Safari 11 on macOS Sierra.
For a workaround you should be able to edit the @include’s of the script. To do this, just open the file up for editing (go to Tampermonkey dashboard and click the edit button next to Wanikani Pitch Info), and change the following lines at the start:
Despite having more characters than English, they actually still have fewer phonemes. We have something like twenty vowel sounds, for instance, compared to the Japanese five, and twenty-four consonants compared to ~seventeen in Japanese. And even though we have all these extra sounds to play with, we still have a shitload of homophones (as @Syphus so ably demonstrated) so it’s to be expected that Japanese has as many and more (barring pitch accent).
As for me, not going into the debate about pronounciation cuz i’ve only just started, what my japanese teacher told us in class was that if there were a doubt about a word and it’s homophones, the speaker would just ‘‘write’’ it off in his hand, with his finger. So the 人工-vs-人口 would be really easy to figure out.
Or else for complicated kanji, they would say ‘‘人口 : 人のじんと口のこう’’ → ''じん from the kanji person (said ひと), the こう from the kanji mouth (said くち) ‘’. Generaly using an other kanji pronounciation, if it was on’yomi than in kun’yomi and vice versa.
But English needs a mix of consonants and vowels, so the way you can combine characters is far more restrictive. bcd isn’t a word. jrl isn’t. You have to mix consonants and vowels. Also, the vast majority of words are three or more characters long.
Japanese, on the other hand, can combine literally any character with any other character. Pretty much the only exception is that a word can’t start with a singular “n”. Also, in contrast to English, any singular phoneme can have meaning. There is no lower limit to the amount of characters you need to actually make a word, again, with the exception of “n”.
So, even though Japanese has less phonemes, the syllabary is structured in a way that should allow for little to no homonyms, due to the flexibility of arranging characters. Instead, the opposite is true, and Japanese seems to have far more homonyms than any other language I’ve encountered.
You need at least a vowel in both languages in order to make a word, or have you forgotten that with one exception all Japanese syllables end on a vowel sound?
As for “combining literally any character” … Rendaku, chiisai tsu…? There are exceptions (just as there are in English too) but there still exist rules for how sounds in Japanese generally go together.
Beyond that, you can’t arrange phonemes in Japanese any way you want. You can’t put two consonants together, for example, other than ん.
The lower limit for phonemes in a word in English is also one. “A” and “I” are just two examples.