sinesalvatorem:

Chinese: How many layers of homophones are you on?

English: Like 5 or 6 right now, my dude

Chinese: You are like a little baby. Watch this:

Chinese: 100 entries for “shi” on this page and more on the next

Chinese: A 92 word poem consisting of nothing but “shi”

Cantonese: I don’t even distinguish “shi” from “si”

Chinese second language learners: *the distant screams of the damned*

That’s why Japanese humor and poetry is so pun- and double meaning-heavy - a lot of technical or literary terms, the stuff that would be Latinate words in English, were borrowed in from Chinese. And Japanese isn’t tonal so it ended up even more indistinguishable. And the way the language works there’s a bit of regularity and end rhyme baked into things already, so an accessible-yet-memorable way to play with words is to overload the same sounds (or characters - irregular sound/kanji mapping, words borrowed in at different points over thousands of years of Chinese language evolution, is a whole other layer) with multiple meanings