Not necessarily, but in many cases you do. The Chinese language uses less than 500 syllables representing tens of thousands of Chinese characters. This means that each “word” in Pinyin can have dozens of completely different and non-connected meanings, because they are different characters that just happen to be pronounced the same. Up to intermediate level this is not much of a problem. However, once you know and are able to express more nuanced ideas in Mandarin, a Pinyin word like “shi” – which has about 80 commonly used characters associated with it, each one often with several different meanings – can become almost meaningless. This is why we recommend taking a Spoken Chinese Only course up to about HSK 3 (B1) level and a normal Chinese language course afterwards.