Well, drive through speakers are also notoriously bad. 😅
But yeah fully agree. When I talk to other people in my 2nd language, I often understand them perfectly well in person but the same person talking about the same thing is hard to understand for me over the phone. If I watch something on TV and I can’t see their face, I feel compelled to turn up the volume way higher than I would for English. Language is harder than we think, but our brains are really good at using all information at its disposal and making it feel deceptively easy.
It makes sense. Your brain uses all kinds of cues even if you don’t realize it. That includes things like smiles and even some degree of “lip reading”. If you can’t see someone’s mouth moving, you lose some cues and your brain has fewer signals to rely on when interpreting speech.
That said, if you can take a phone call, you can understand someone through a mask. It’s not an impenetrable barrier for communication.
As a non-drinker, some of these are great but some are non-tenable.
“Just don’t like the taste” will lead to all kinds of suggestions where “you can’t even taste the alcohol!!!!” (it inevitably tastes like nothing but a sweeter form of alcohol).
Things like “I’m driving later” or “ate something earlier” are one-time use tokens.
I don’t see a lot of people voicing this opinion so I’ll share this:
I like lemmit. It adds value to me as I can keep up with some very small communities on Reddit that I care about a lot, while spending all of my time on lemmy. If it didn’t exist, I’d have to keep visiting Reddit for some communities, and that would make me sad. Yes, I hope I can abandon Reddit completely some day, but lemmit is a great way for certain things to transition across the gap that still exists.