Isn't the context thing true for anyone learning a second language?
I was an immigrant in the US as a teenager and it felt like that in English for me my first few years here. Eventually I got to a point where I can understand stuff without actively paying attention, and it got a lot easier to understand anything with or without context.
As an interesting aside, I speak Cantonese natively, and I barely speak Mandarin. Mandarin to me is like that as well. I have to pay 100% attention to keep up, and as soon as I lose context, all hope is lost in understanding anything in the conversation forward.
I find Chinese much harder for context because the lack of things like conjugations, genders, plurals, tenses, etc plus every word basically being 1-2 syllables means that there’s a lot more meaning packed in fewer sounds. In English and often in Japanese too, if you hear those auxiliary grammatical markers you can kind of piece together the parts you missed. To be fair people then compensate by slurring their speech more than your typical Chinese speaker would so maybe it balances out.
I was an immigrant in the US as a teenager and it felt like that in English for me my first few years here. Eventually I got to a point where I can understand stuff without actively paying attention, and it got a lot easier to understand anything with or without context.
As an interesting aside, I speak Cantonese natively, and I barely speak Mandarin. Mandarin to me is like that as well. I have to pay 100% attention to keep up, and as soon as I lose context, all hope is lost in understanding anything in the conversation forward.