[yorwba]

> compared to something like middle english, which modern readers cannot read at all, you can see that the chinese language hasn't changed all that much

It helps that ancient texts are usually not presented in the original handwriting (which has changed a lot over the millenia) and of course the writing system masks changes in pronunciation. If you speak Mandarin, try reading a text in another Sinitic language using an alphabetic writing system, e.g. a random article of the Hakka Wikipedia: https://hak.wikipedia.org/ Then consider how different the last common ancestor of both languages must have been.