I just wanted to comment on your point about tones. I'm a pretty mediocre Chinese speaker, but I find it much easier to hear Chinese than English. At the level

I just wanted to comment on your point about tones. I'm a pretty mediocre Chinese speaker, but I find it much easier to hear Chinese than English. At the level of full sentences, English is far easier for me, but at the word level the advantage is equal in magnitude favoring Chinese. I think it's because it's much easier to hear the voiced sounds that comprise the majority of Chinese, whereas in English a lot of the meaning is loaded into the high-pass unvoiced component. From the perspective of the listener, it seems to make much more sense to use the higher-SNR of voiced sounds to convey the bulk of information (as I believe Chinese does), rather than the much weaker unvoiced sounds (which English makes heavy use of.) I'm guessing the prominence of unvoiced sounds in speech owes to their being less effort to form, or to their universality across different people whose voiced sounds would have substantially different frequency components.