I love chinese and its grammar/expressiveness is fantastic, but having lived in China and now Taiwan, I have a hunch that for even for native speakers Chinese is actually harder to "make out" than English.
For instance all Chinese movies/shows have subtitles that everyone reads along with (even in Beijing/Taipei). At first I thought this was for people that have poor Mandarin (minorities, old people that only speak a local dialect etc) but it seems even people that only speak standard mandarin also "need" subtitles to make out all the words. Without them a lot of words aren't distinct enough to make out over speakers/headphones. In every day speech as I understand it's common to not make out words as well and to kinda guess along what the other person said. It's possible to speak clearly, like a tv announcer, but as soon as you get a bit lazy or speak to fast it's easy to become unintelligible
I'd be curious to hear some native speaker's thoughts on this
For instance all Chinese movies/shows have subtitles that everyone reads along with (even in Beijing/Taipei). At first I thought this was for people that have poor Mandarin (minorities, old people that only speak a local dialect etc) but it seems even people that only speak standard mandarin also "need" subtitles to make out all the words. Without them a lot of words aren't distinct enough to make out over speakers/headphones. In every day speech as I understand it's common to not make out words as well and to kinda guess along what the other person said. It's possible to speak clearly, like a tv announcer, but as soon as you get a bit lazy or speak to fast it's easy to become unintelligible
I'd be curious to hear some native speaker's thoughts on this