Quick answer
Sixteen wind tiles, four each of North, East, West and South. Your seat wind decides who deals and the order of play. The card decides which wind tiles a hand needs, and those are separate questions.
Winds trip people up for a reason that has nothing to do with the tiles being hard. The word is doing two jobs at once. There is the wind you are, which is your seat at the table, and there is the wind on a tile, which is a thing you collect. Hearing them used interchangeably leads to assuming your seat controls which winds you are allowed to build with. Separating the two makes the whole subject simple.
Sixteen tiles, four kinds
North, East, West and South, four copies of each, sixteen in a set. They carry no numbers, which is the important structural fact about them: a North has no neighbour the way a 4 Bam has a 3 Bam and a 5 Bam. It groups only with other Norths.
That is why winds never appear in runs. A hand that wants consecutive numbers cannot use them, and a hand that wants winds wants them as a pair, a pung or a kong of the same wind.
The seat you are is not the tile you need
At the start of a game the players roll for seats. The highest roll becomes East and deals, and going anticlockwise the others take South, West and North. That assignment decides who deals, where play starts, and how the deal rotates when the hand ends.
What it does not do is tell you which wind tiles to collect. The card does that. A line that calls for a pung of North wants a pung of North from whoever is playing it, and nothing printed on the card asks where you are sitting.
So if you are sitting North and the line you are going for wants East, collect East. The two uses of the word are unrelated and the confusion is purely linguistic.
What the card asks for
Winds show up in the card section built around them, alongside dragons, where lines combine wind groups with dragon groups. They also appear in other sections as a component, including NEWS, one of each of the four winds, which reads as a word and is easy to spot on the card once you know to look.
Read the grouping, not the vibe. A line wanting a pair of Souths and a line wanting a kong of Souths are completely different asks in terms of how likely you are to get there, because a pair cannot be filled with a joker and a kong can.
Winds and jokers
Winds follow the ordinary joker rule. A joker can stand in inside a pung, kong or quint of one wind, and never inside a pair or for a single tile.
NEWS is worth singling out because of this. Four different winds, one of each, means four singles, and singles take no jokers at all. A NEWS component has to be drawn or called honestly, which makes any line containing one harder than its tile count suggests.
Playing them
A lone wind early is a weak tile. It serves only lines that want that exact wind, and until you have picked a direction it is holding a seat for a hand you may never play. It is one of the easier Charleston passes to make.
A natural pair of one wind is worth more than it looks, for the same reason any natural pair is: no joker can ever make you the second one, so a pair you were dealt is a genuine head start on the lines that want that wind.
Late in the hand, winds are readable. An opponent with a wind exposure is visibly collecting one specific wind, and winds are among the easiest tiles at the table to work out a need for, because there is no ambiguity about what a North is part of. If somebody has Souths exposed, a South from your rack is not a safe throw.
Put it into practice
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Whether the winds in your rack are worth keeping depends entirely on what else is in it. Mei, our AI coach, reads your actual thirteen tiles and says which direction they go for, which tiles earn their place and which are holding a seat for a hand that is not coming.