I'm fan of watching subbed Chinese movies and series and with them sometimes happens something that very rarely happens with movies or series from other languages that's the fact that I haven't been able to read the subbed sentence before the next sentence appears.
From what I know from Chinese, this a logical consequence of how lots of their words are, being usually short to pronounce and having different meanings depending from the context.
Apart from that I get the feeling that Chinese people even have an higher speed on pronouncing their words, I don't consider to be a slow talking person in my native language and I get the feeling that, at least on films and movies, they talk even faster than me in their own language, not sure how much that translates into daily life, although from the little times I've heard Chinese people in their native language, they also looked to maintain that fast paced way.
Is there some reason that lead to Chinese being developed like that? Maybe it's an historical one, so this might fit better in history.stackexchange.org, any way I think it's worth it giving it a shot here.