Words That Sound Alike - I Am Zuo Confused!

I've said a lot of nice things about Chinese grammar being so simple.

Now let me complain about something.

I've heard it said about Japanese that the language "is so phonologically impoverished that it is inundated with an unwieldy number of homophones".

I'm afraid the situation isn't much better with Mandarin. The language has only about 400 distinct syllables, and even differentiating on the basis of tones only yields 1600 syllables at best.

English, by contrast, is estimated to have over 15,000 distinct syllables, or phonemes.

The problem with having a limited set of phonemes is that the language then has a very large number of homophones (words having the same sound but different meanings), which can be confusing to a learner, and perhaps even to seasoned speakers of the language.

French also has this problem of too many homophones, which is why it's said (only half-humorously) that French courts require statements to be written rather than oral.

Less than 40 days into Duolingo, I've already come across at least four variants of "zuo" (pronounced "dzoo-oh"), and this is confusing the hell out of me.

While I appreciate the evocative nature of the ideograph 坐 zuò ("sit"), which seems to depict two 人 rén ("persons") sitting on a bench of some sort, I'm feeling inundated by the number of other zuos.

There are three characters with the fourth (falling) tone - 坐 zuò ("sit"), 做 zuò ("do"), and 作 zuò ("do"). The last two even mean the same thing! (I believe that they differ in the combinations they support with other characters, to produce words with different meanings. Still...!)

Then there's the third (falling-rising) tone 左 zuǒ ("left"), and the second (rising) tone 昨 zuó ("yesterday").

It's hard to tell who's who in the zuo.