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)
*blackgreen* has already mentioned ambiguity in speech. But I disagree with the notion that ambiguity in tense does not actually exist in Chinese. It does, and nothing anyone can say can eliminate it. Even if you are perfectly fluent in Chinese, it simply does not have the capability to systematically convey the same spectrum of tenses that English can.

For example, consider the following:

Past tenses:

1. I had read the book.
2. I read the book.
3. I had been reading the book.

Present tenses:

1. I have read the book.
2. I have been reading the book.
3. I am reading the book.

Future tenses:

1. I will have read the book.
2. I will read the book.
3. I will be reading the book.

In Chinese, you would likely need the wider context to tell you even whether it is in the past, present or future, but even the context may not tell you clearly which exact tense it is. For example, you might think that you can say "I had read the book" using "我已读了那本书" (assuming it is clear from the context that this is in the past). Sure, but can you easily distinguish between "I have been reading the book" and "I am reading the book"? In practice, the context will tell you the temporal order of events, but in Chinese we often do not convey specific information about the grammatical aspect, whereas English grammar requires specifying that.

In general, I believe most of the difference in precision between English and Chinese stems from the fact that English has a significantly more complicated grammar than Chinese, which enables higher precision at the cost of being more rigid.

Vocabulary wise, there may not be much difference because in any natural language many common verbs and nouns have multiple meanings and require the context to disambiguate. For instance, "想" does mean "think" or "think of", where "think of" can be used to convey "miss", and you can be more precise by choosing "想念". I don't know why you think "让" means "ask", because it doesn't. (If it does in some dialect, it is like people incorrectly writing "would of" instead of "would have" and "their" instead of "they're" due to hearing them pronounced similarly but not having learnt correct English.)