I’m always amazed how much cultural knowledge is involved in name recognition. As an English speaker, I know “Bob” and “Sam” (and “Pete”, for that matter) are names and not just nonsense words. Meanwhile, I’m trying to learn Mandarin Chinese, and just about anything that could be a word sounds like it could be a name to me. Since the field is so wide open (i.e. I haven’t learned what are plausible names and what aren’t), I find Chinese names a lot harder to remember.