When I lived in Asia I "adopted" a lost kitten near my house. As I now had cat food in the house, the local streetcats know how to find me!

I had these two little kitten siblings; no idea where their mother was but they hung around the house, because food. If the food was out they would meow and whine for food, so I would get up to bring them food and they would hiss at me for getting too close to the food bowl before I even had a chance to put any food in.

I never thought that was especially intelligent; "biting the hand that feeds you" and all that.

After dealing with many cats for two years I don't rate cats as very high on the intelligence department. They're basically autistic dogs. They are cuter though. And they don't eat poop off the street.

Yet, you kept feeding a neighborhood full of cats in the way they had trained you.

This. Cats seem stupid when convenient and are annoying but in the end they seem to get what they want.

Certainly domesticated cats are much more adept at predicting the behavior and actions of humans.

We had two cats, a tortoise-shell and a tabby. The tortoise-shell would come running when it was time for dinner, and the tabby would take his time. Once, I noticed that the tortoise-shell kept switching back and forth between dishes until the tabby got there, and I wondered why. It was probably so she could eat as much from both plates before having to finally commit to one. Kinda clever for a cat, in my opinion :)

anecdotal corroboration: my cat recognizes and responds to 5-6 different words/phrases for food, even from a visitor, but does not understand a single other word in any language spoken in the house: food, snack, treat, cookie, nom-nom. he responds to each of these uniquely (we use them to refer to different things he can eat).

Alternate hypothesis: your cat has a fluent understanding of the English language, and has a vocabulary as large as yours - but he doesn't deign to care about words that don't relate to your purpose (i.e., providing food).