Why This Language is Sometimes Infuriating to Study

According to Wikipedia, Mandarin has only 400 spoken monosyllables, but over 10,000 characters. What this means is that even though there are 10,000 characters, there are only 400 ways to pronounce them, so many characters by default have to be pronounced the same way. 4 tones (if you can distinguish them - even after two years, I sometimes have trouble) increase the available number of sounds to 1600, but that's still nowhere near enough. Check out the following two links to get an idea of what I am talking about:

http://www.mdbg.net/chindict/chindict.php?page=worddict&wdrst=0&wdqb=shi

http://www.mdbg.net/chindict/chindict.php?page=worddict&wdrst=0&wdqb=shishi

Notice that ignoring the tones, all of the words are pronounced exactly the same way (either "shi" or "shishi"). Even knowing the tones doesn't remove all the ambiguity. Then, when you have "she" (pronounced almost the same way as "shi" - the difference is there, but it's subtle) as another sound, you're stuck trying to differentiate "shi" "she" "sheshi" "shishe" and "shishi" (fortunately "sheshe" doesn't mean anything).

I've never studied Spanish, but I can listen to someone speak Spanish and have a good idea of what he's talking about. But when a Chinese person says "shishi," and I'm stuck trying to figure out which of the 20 shishi's he meant, it's sometimes difficult to understand.

Enough complaining. Time to do my homework.