Quite often, a word of a language has no direct counterpart in another language but corresponds to two or more different words. This causes problems in language learning and usage. For example, a Finn might mistakenly say “I didn’t wait for that” when he means “I didn’t expect that”, since both “to wait” and “to expect” correspond to the Finnish verb odottaa. Similarly, the Finnish verb lainata means both “to loan” and “to borrow”, and vuokrata means both “to rent” and “to rent out”. Thus, halutaan vuokrata (where halutaan means “one wants to…”) contains in principle an ambiguous infinitive; in language practice, it means that one wants to rent an apartment.
For a person with English as native language, an English word that corresponds to two or more Finnish words may cause difficulties in language learning, but also in usage. You may have understood and learned the correspondences, but you keep forgetting it, and sometimes you just don’t know which word to use. For example, the English word “wood” mainly corresponds to puu in Finnish, but in some contexts, especially in the plural, it corresponds to metsä (forest). A more difficult word is the English verb “to play”: when playing games, it is pelata in Finnish; when playing a record, it is soittaa; when children play, it is leikkiä; and so on.