Why so many definitions associated with each word? I'm learning a little Chinese out of curiosity, and I have a basic question about the language as a whole, rather than a specific technical question about a particular word or character. Sorry if this is too broad.

I just want to learn a little spoken Chinese, not the writing system, so I've been seeking out pinyin texts. Let's say I come across a word such as jiǎng that I don't know. I look it up on Wiktionary, and get something like:

jiǎng (Zhuyin ㄐㄧㄤˇ)

Pinyin reading of 堿
Pinyin reading of 桨, 槳
Pinyin reading of 滰
Pinyin reading of 獎
Pinyin reading of 繈
Pinyin reading of 繣
Pinyin reading of 膙
Pinyin reading of 蒋, 蔣
Pinyin reading of 襁
Pinyin reading of 講, 讲
Pinyin reading of 顜


Each of those characters seem to have totally different meanings: paddle, salty, reward... so my question is: how do the Chinese manage to communicate orally? Specifically, let's say one Chinese speaker says something to another. If there are 10 different definitions associated with each sound the first person makes, then how can the second person work out what's being said? Am I misunderstanding something, or is it simply that you have to work out which definition is being used from context?

To use a very specific example, what if a Chinese speaker said jiǎng to me? I mean what if they actually formed the sound jee-yah-ng - how could I tell what they meant?
Chinese was once monosyllabic, where one character represented one word. But back then, thousands of years ago, pronunciation for characters was also much more distinct, and still is in certain topolects (like Cantonese).

Modern Mandarin, on the other hand, compensates for lack of precision in pronunciation by being polysyllabic, where mosts words are either disyllabic or trisyllabic. There are still monosyllabic words, but they are usually easily comprehensible by context (like 我 and other pronouns).

Most of the characters you list are rather rare, biut let’s consider the common ones. 奖 (獎), as in prize, award, is usually found in compounds such as Nuobei’erjiang (Nobel prize), jiangjin (money award), jiangpai (prize medal) and so on.

This could hardly be confused with 讲, speak, with compounds such as jiangjia (bargain), jianghua (talk), jiangjie (explain) and so on.

We could also refer to 蒋介石 (Jiang Jieshi), where 蒋 is a common family name. Context will mostly be evident when names are invoked.

Your strategy should therefore be to learn compound words. Since you do not want to learn written Chinese, just forget that there are characters, there are only words, and words are usually polysyllabic: women, gongneng, guangchang, gonggong qiche, laobanniang, dalu, mantou, chengyu, and so on.