For example the word "hammer" is a noun but also a verb meaning "to hit with a hammer". "Ship" is a noun but also a verb meaning "to send by ship" and so on.

I'd say this probably happens much more often than native English speakers even realize. You mostly notice it as a beginner, if your native language does not have strict rules for word order (because you differentiate different types of words by their suffixes or something like that) so you can move the words freely around in your first language. And then you read some English sentence where every single word has two or more possible meanings, and it's like a puzzle with an exponential difficulty. And you feel like: WTF, how can these people even get any meaning across in such ambiguous language?

Then you learn the rule that when you see "X Y Z", then "Z" is probably a noun, and "X" and "Y" are adjectives that modify it (unless "Y" is a verb, which means that the noun "X" is doing the "Y"-action to the noun "Z"), which reduces the search space. And after enough practice your brain starts doing it automatically, so the ambiguity becomes invisible.