>>Now I am wondering how French language stands, in terms of how fast or slow the natives talk. Probably later this fall I will start dedicating even more time to French and wonder how long it will take me to be proficient in understanding the natives and expression myself more or less coherently.
>
>Fast in what sense? How was this measured?
>
>I can imagine three speeds, at least
>
>- number of syllables per minute (pretty similar to typing speed in characters per minute)
>
>- number of words per minute
>
>- amount of actual information per minute
>
>In my own language the speed may differ between areas - I'm in a slow speaking area, those from far south are sometimes almost incomprehensible to me, I often have to replay in my head to understand what they said. But there are some areas nearby, where I thought the guy was stupid - but no, he's just speaking far slower than we here, as is customary in his village.
>
>I confess I'm biased towards the third measure, as the number of words means nothing, or misleads at least. Spanish and other article-ridden languages, with little morphology but lots of articles and mandatory pronouns will have many more words where morphology rich languages will have those implied, will allow lots of word omissions.
>
>But then how can they measure that without bias?

I forgot to mention that the speed (as you correctly pointed) was measured in syllables per unit of time (I don't remember if it was 1 minute or 10 minutes).
And you are correct that in every language there are regions where people speak slower or faster.
But I believe that the study was correct. On average Spanish speakers pronounce considerably more syllables per unit of time. Which makes understanding them very difficult. Regardless if they use articles or pronouns or other words.

I think Slavic languages, in general, are considerably slower than Spanish. That is, fewer words/syllables per unit of measure. Also, in Slavic languages - unlike, for example, French - there no is "liaison" between words. Which makes it harder (in French) to understand because the same word may or may not have an ending depending on its position in the sentence and the next word.

In this program that I saw (that prompted me to post here) they wrote an expression (in Spanish) on the blackboard. Then had native people to translate and say it in their language. Italian, German, Mandarin Chinese. And just by the sound of it, one could tell that the languages other than Spanish took more time to say the same thing.