Sometimes but not very often. The reason is that the rest of the words in the sentence together with the general situation is enough to make words unambiguous. This can be a challenge when learning because you have to map meanings onto both sounds and situations if that makes sense. It also means that Mandarin is great for making puns.

Does being situational make the language more efficient to speak? You don't need nearly as many words when the meaning is tied to context.

I've always been curious about east Asian languages and culture since they're relatively isolated from Western influence and historic ties to the British empire

This might be the case for illiterate people, but these days it's mandatory for Mainland Chinese citizens to complete at least 9 years of education. Different words with the same written form usually have different pronunciations, and different words with the same pronunciation usually have different written forms. It's rare for a word to carry different meanings solely depending on context.

Tones is the obvious answer that others have given, because they are often omitted in written pinyin. But even phonetic representation with tone annotation has problems. Take the following characters as examples:

他: he, him; it 她: she, her

These are both pronounced EXACTLY the same in spoken mandarin, and would be indistinguishable in a phonetic transcription. But standard written Chinese is more expressive than spoken mandarin because it allows for gender clarification.

Also take this example:

買: "mǎi" to buy 賣: "mài" to sell

These have exactly opposite meaning, and are differentiated only by tone. Without tone diacritics you would not be able to distinguish the two apart. Even with tone diacritics, reading is slowed because the difference between the two is only a small, semantically meaningless diacritical mark, whereas 賣 has an extra symbolic component that indicates its meaning.

It is worth noting that the female first person pronoun 她 is a relatively recent invention inspired by republicanism and the rise of venacular writing. Some writers in the 1920s and 30s used a more distinctive word 伊 (pronounced yi1) but over time the homophonic female Ta1 became mainstream.

What also happened then was an influential movement to fully romanise written Chinese and some of the proposals are radical even for today as they plan to do away with tones completely.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latinxua_Sin_Wenz

Pinyin was a scaled down version of these except it was never meant to replace the current writing system.

There's a language/dialect called Dongan which is written in Cyrillic without tone markers, and is to some extent mutually intelligible with Mandarin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungan_language

A litlle. Intonation and non verbal cues help a bit with disambiguation. Also, while pinyin can have tone markers, they are a pain to type and are often omitted.

It is not rare to see people who are having an oral conversation disambiguate words by drawing them with the index finger in the palm of their hand.

Spoken Mandarin is virtually always spoken with tones (except when sung, or when foreigners speak it), but when written virtually never has tones (e.g. signs). Only childrens books write the tone marks. So, along with various other intonation, there's a lot more information communicated during speech.

Sure it always happen. "Let me eat a Chicken" has the same pronunciation of "Let me eat a dk". Same thing as some one named focker...

Not really, except that Chinese is a fantastic language for puns :D