Question: After some time learning Chinese, I feel Chinese language is more ambiguous than English or Spanish, in the sense that a single sentence without some context can easily have multiple distinct meanings, for example, when there are characters with different meanings such as 想 with think/want/miss or 让 with let/ask (and the situation can be even worse in an oral conversation with homophone characters).

**Question:** I would like to hear what more advanced learners or Chinese natives think about this appreciation. In particular, is it true Chinese is in general more ambiguous than English? So for the same sentence in Chinese than in English, do you usually need to provide more context in order to transmit a message?

Answer: 
TL;DR I would say so, yes.

One type of ambiguity is given by the [isolating nature](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isolating_language) of the language (i.e. absence of inflection) combined with a high frequency of homophones.

Which means if you hear me saying *bei1 ju4*, am I talking about a tragedy 悲剧 or glassware 杯具？This requires context to disambiguate.

You might think: "well that's easy to disambiguate". Okay, what about you hear me saying: 我的 ji4 yi4 很差! Is it 记忆 (memory) or 技艺 (skill)?!

As you can see, this ambiguity exists in *speech only*. In writing, you readily identify what I'm talking about by just looking at the actual characters.

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Another type of ambiguity is given by the lack of verb tenses, which makes it harder to figure out if someone is talking about a past, present or future event. This usually requires time indicators (那时候，今天，明天，去年，当时), particles or auxiliaries (过，了，将，要), or a larger frame of reference, e.g. a previous sentence.  

**But** it's possible to argue, and it's a valid argument in my opinion, that this kind of ambiguity *practically* exists only when you compare Chinese to a language with different grammatical features, and not in absolute. As your proficiency level increases, you simply **get used** to how the language flows.

And at that point the comparison with English is maybe a little moot: the two languages are just 不一样。

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**Edit**:
As an additional note, English itself doesn't lack weird ambiguities, apparently known as [garden-path sentences](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence)
After some reflection, I believe my question is not completely well-posed. I think we could only compare the ambiguity in languages if they were not able to transmit all the information; but that is not the case in languages used in communication. So, as pointed in other answers, even though there exist some structures in Chinese that isolated might be "ambiguous"; they are able to transmit the desired information with some additional content. This additional content can be analogous, for example, to that of the verb tense in English.

On the other hand, a more sensible measure for comparing the languages is the **information transmitted per syllable** in a speech. Indeed, this was studied in the article [Coupé, Christophe, et al. "Different languages, similar encoding efficiency: Comparable information rates across the human communicative niche." Science advances 5.9 (2019): eaaw2594](https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/9/eaaw2594). Although by all means not a definitive study (they only compared 15 paragraphs texts), they obtained similar but slightly smaller values in Chinese Mandarin (6.96 bits/ syllable) than in English (7.09 bits/ syllable). Furthermore, they studied the Speech Rate (the speed at which syllables are spoken); even though this varies greatly with the speaker, on average they found a slightly lower Speech Rate in Chinese Mandarin (5.9 +- 0.6 syllables/second) than in English (6.3 +- 0.7 syllables/second). Overall, the Information Rate (the velocity at which information content is transmitted) is quite similar but again, on average, slightly lower for Mandarin (41 +- 4 bits/ second) than English (45 +- 5 bits/ second). Indeed, in the article they argue this rate is very similar across all languages and might be the most efficient rate: a higher value could be difficult to process, a slower value could be difficult to remember.

Below we have the Speech Rate and Information Rate for several languages (thanks to the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license of the article):

* CMN = Chinese Mandarin
* ENG = English
* SR = Speech Rate (syllables per second)
* IR = Information Rate (bits per second)

[![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/HcObM.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/HcObM.jpg)