Are some languages really spoken more rapidly than others ?

Do native speakers of certain languages actually speak faster than others? or does it just seem that way because of my ignorance of that language?

i am not sure whether this has been researched.
but i think romance languages are actually spoken slower than English. specially portuguese and italian.
i find English sound faster because they have all sorts of vowel and word reduction. In English, syllables are not given equal time. The more important ones are pronounced clearly, but the less important ones are reduced and pronounced rather quickly, if at all. In a normal English sentence, only the words that are really important are pronounced completely; the others are mushed together, sometimes so often that they have slang spellings (gonna, wanna, etc.)

i think if you learn portuguese or italian, you will end up understanding more than if you had learnd spanish or german.
they are easy to understand meaning. annoying to say the least.

Russian speakers tend to speak faster than English and German.
I am learning french and it seems as though many speak very slow.
But certain vowels and-or consonants at the ends of words are often silent/combined or are not pronounced, and then words are run together, it makes for a quicker pattern of speech.

I don't think so, it all depends on the speaker more than the language itself, anyway some languages generally sound clearer than others, in my opinion Mexican Spanish is one the clearest languages in the world, pretty easy to understand, even compared to European Spanish. On the other hand, it is much easier to understand the meaning of the news on tv than, for i nstance, a conversation between friends in the street....

The spanish language is very fast..!!

European Spanish is fast but the American one is more rithmic and easier to crasp

once by some linguists and by that experiment the fastest spoken European language was French.

I always had the impression that Italian was spoken super fast for some reason. You seem to think the opposite. But maybe you're right.

Blacks tend to speak very slowly.

I am a person who has italian ancestry and the reason the language is spoken slow is most italians put emphasis on certain words with drawn out sounds on letters like e and u.

Yes it is true , French is the fastest speaking language in europe...the french people are speaking the highest number of words per unit of time. Pay attention to this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzvGyXEb5Z0&feature=related

Mexican Spanish is shit.

Dogs speak better Spanish.