"I read that magazine": do I mean regularly, or that I have done in the past?
"The messenger wrote down Lincoln's address": was that his home, or his speech?
The context would need to be quite explicit to work around problems such as this.
“Dog” and “cat” have different pronunciations in English, and therefore mean different things.
There are many word pairs in many languages that are written exactly the same way but have different pronunciations and different meanings.
The verb "lead" and the noun "lead" (i.e., the metal) are two different words, pronounced differently. The fact that they are spelled the same is just an example of how the English writing system doesn't encode the English language perfectly accurately.