I watch a lot of the Scandi Noir dramas on Channel 4, All 4 and BBC4 and by necessity you get used to watching with subtitles.
I also record or stream much of what I watch rather than watch it live. I've noticed that in many English (and particularly American produced) speaking films, dramas etc. the speech is often indistinguishable from time to time. I will often stop the playback, rewind, and replay the relevant scene(s) with the subtitles on.
I'm convinced directors are trying to make films / dramas more authentic with actors whispering, talking over each other, talking against background noise, talking when not facing the camera etc., whereas previously actors spoke more distinctly and to camera. I can't recall having difficulty understanding speech in films / dramas 10 years ago - or maybe my hearing is deteriorating.
I reckon a combination of seeing a couple of key words, the context of the scene and tone of voice etc giving me enough info that I don't need to actively read the entire block of text.
Thinking about it, that bit about the tone of voice probably explains why I need the volume to be the same as if it was in English.
Just watch Das Boot
We have a big aversion to dubbing here most of the world just gets on with it, it's distracting at first but it goes away mostly. I prefer subtitles for 'quality' stuff I suppose but then it puts me off watching them because I can't be bothered.
I prefer subtitles over dubbing although I find as I get older I'm more easily distracted watching TV and with subtitled stuff sometimes realise I haven't been reading them for a few minutes and have to rewind to find out what was said.
My elderly dad has started watching everything on Sky with subtitles turned on (I don't know why as he has vision not hearing problems...) and that's really distracting - they're in the middle of the screen in bright letters and as done live (I assume via software) they lag behind and often get words wrong. I realised I was watching programs and just looking at the subtitles rather than the pictures
Hearing the language adds so much even if it’s unintelligible, so it’s dubbing for me.
Erm obviously I meant NOT dubbing.
Got used to really lazy dubbing as a child in Hong Kong. The cinema club i used to belong to would get in these really (and I mean Titanically bad) Japanese b-movie black and white series. They were Cops and Gangster, Sci-Fi, samurai stuff that was truly awfully dubbed...There would be gangster No1 expositioning to the cops about his dastardly plan, and you'd get to see him full face mouthing al the complex Japanese language only for the Dub to say in a really bored faux-American/Chinese voice..."Yeah"
I'm pretty sure they just watched the entire thing, made up some half assed plot and then dubbed over the top regardless of what was actually going on...Pretty Rad when you're 10...
that’s really distracting – they’re in the middle of the screen in bright letters and as done live (I assume via software) they lag behind and often get words wrong. I realised I was watching programs and just looking at the subtitles rather than the pictures
This is related to the Stroop effect - which is where reading words describing colours such as "green" is faster than actually recognizing the colour, and recognizing the colour of text of colour words printed in a different colour (e.g. "green" printed in a blue font) is much slower again. If you do a lot of reading, the decoding is automatized and you just can't stop it, so answering "blue" for the word "green" printed in blue is much more difficult than reading the word "green" aloud.
When you have subtitles, you just automatically process them, but you can do that much faster than the spoken words, so you keep getting ahead of things and then have to reprocess the spoken language. And, of course, the subtitles are often different to the actual dialogue, so it throws you off. The better your reading skill, the worse it will affect you. It doesn't occur when the dialogue is in a language you can't understand because you haven't automatized the processing of that so there is no cognitive interference.
This is related to the Stroop effect – which is where reading words describing colours such as “green” is faster than actually recognizing the colour, and recognizing the colour of text of colour words printed in a different colour (e.g. “green” printed in a blue font) is much slower again.
That's not the case for everyone though. Me for example; I process what I see much faster than what I read. Just always have been a very slow reader. I get to the bottom of a page and forget what I read at the top. If I'm handed an A4 page full of text I just glaze over and cant take it in without a lot of concentration. Hand me a photo to look at for 10 seconds and I can talk about it all day.
That’s not the case for everyone though. Me for example; I process what I see much faster than what I read. Just always have been a very slow reader.That’s not the case for everyone though. Me for example; I process what I see much faster than what I read. Just always have been a very slow reader.
You might have missed this sentence.
The better your reading skill, the worse it will affect you.
