* 龍 (simplified as 龙) by itself always means dragon *
In the Chinese character compound 水龍頭 , which is the usual Chinese word for "faucet," there is an etymological reason why the character 龍 is there, but a Chinese person, just like an English-speaking person, thinks of the object as "faucet" (one semantic unit, spoken in three syllables) rather than as "water dragon head."
Other examples can be multiplied by anyone who has paid careful attention to the details of the Chinese writing system. The compound 車床 (lathe) is completely opaque to a native speaker of English, who might guess that "cart bed" means "chassis," but would never guess that it means "lathe."
That's not a counter example to the point I brought up.
A counter example would be an example of 2 Korean words that are ambiguous in regards to homophones when written in Chinese characters but non-ambiguous when written in Hangul.
Actually I'd be very interested to see any Korean, Japanese or Chinese words that are more ambiguous when rendered with characters than phonetic syllabaries (i.e hangul, hiragana, zhuyin...).
