Why Everyone Is Watching TV With Closed Captioning On These Days (kottke.org) 440
Jason Kottke: A few months ago I noticed that several friends (who speak English and aren't deaf) routinely watch TV and movies with closed captions and subtitles on. I asked about this on Twitter and the resulting thread was fascinating. Turns out many of you watch TV this way for all kinds of different reasons -- to follow complex dialog in foreign or otherwise difficult accents, some folks better retain information while reading, keeping the sound down so as not to wake sleeping children in tight living spaces, and lots of people who aren't deaf find listening difficult for many reasons (some have trouble listening to dialogue when there's any sort of non-ambient noise in the background).
(nearly) everything was subtitled (Score:5, Interesting)
Times are changing (Score:3, Insightful)
It's because people often watch TV or YouTube while multitasking. They can just read the words while listening to music/their boss, or they are watching on a subway/at restaurant without headphones. This is no longer the age of the whole families gathers in from of the TV for a wholesome good evening.
Re:Times are changing (Score:4, Funny)
... while listening to music/their boss ...
What? Like they're in a meeting, and they're watching GoT on their laptop while their boss is talking?
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Indeed, I find that watching without subtitles leads you to a higher challenge in discovering subtle accents and new languages. I find total immersion the best way to learn a new language or to familiarize yourself with variations of a language you already know.
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But you can only do that if you know something of the language already.
I learnt English that way by watching MTV's Most Wanted in the 1980s. With my high school English I could understand about 25% of what was said there when I started, and when Ray Cokes was fed up with Most Wanted a few years later and it had changed beyond recognition I could understand nearly everything. Good times...
(a.k.a Subs, not Dubs) (Score:3)
But you can only do that if you know something of the language already.
I can agree to this... the German shows help me keep from getting completely rusty (from previous knowledge and use of the language), but watching Anime w/ subtitles (because let's face it, dubs suck) didn't really help me pick up too much proficiency in the Japanese language.
I suspect this is because you need to have linguistic 'guideposts' to anchor and interpret a given sentence, and over time you have an easier time recognizing other words and tying them to the translation.
There is the danger of tying y
Re:More msmash FAKE NEWS (Score:5, Insightful)
No, what the headline means is that closed captioning is finding a variety of new uses far beyond its two original applications.
Re:Times are changing (Score:5, Interesting)
Gotta love autocaptioned content.
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Those look like the suggestions offered by text entry on most phones...
Re: Times are changing (Score:5, Interesting)
I watch American stuff with subtitles enabled because they all have really loud sound effects etc and quiet dialog. It's the opposite way with British stuff so I don't enable subtitles on those.
Re: Times are changing (Score:5, Informative)
British stuff especially stuff made for the BBC follow the BBC production guidelines. These guidelines include loudness level relative and absolute between dialogue and effects and frequency bands where those dialogue and effects should be, and the reasons why like how human are able to differentiate between sounds.
Outdoor! (Score:3)
Why even have a livingroom?
Yes, indeed, that's lost space where you could be storing more outdoor sports equipment!
(Okay, I turning in my geek card).
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I'm Flemish and I often hear my fellow countrymen say the same thing, and berate the Walloons and French for not speaking English as well as us.
But the truth is, Dutch (and its Flemish version even more than the Netherlands variant) is much closer to English than any other language. It's so easy for us to learn English simply because we already speak a language that has the same sounds and many similarities. Subtitles help, but not as much as many people think, otherwise everyone in Flanders would also spea
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People are weird.
Especially Flemish people who refuse to clear their throat and cover you with phlegm while pronouncing their "g" sounds :)
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Stupid Flanders.
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I noticed this when driving through the Netherlands, that I had been listening to a Dutch radio station for quite some time and hadn't realised they were not talking English. The language has the same pace, the same peaks and troughs and they laughed and intoned things in just the same way. It sounds more like UK English than most American English in those ways.
Re:(nearly) everything was subtitled (Score:5, Informative)
countries where the movies are subtitled tend to have better foreign-language skills than countries where the movies are dubbed. Sorry, I can't find a reference to the study.
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Nearly everything was subtitled when I was young, mostly because most stuff was not in my native tongue (dutch). That's probably why most of the people in my country speak English without many problems.
The real reason is that people in the Netherlands know English is: 1. Because it is similar to Dutch and you can deduce the meaning of may words and 2. you've put in the time to study it in school, have homework, read books etc.
Watching TV with subtitles alone does *not* help with language learning. Try watching Chinese TV with subtitles for 10 years and see how much you can learn just by watching without school where this is part of your education.
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Of course it's not the subtitles. It's watching TV in english that practices your english! The subtitles are there for people who don't have a basic grip of english and the reason why they get away with having most of their TV program in english.
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I bet watching Chinese TV with subtitles for 10 years would certainly help, in particular if it were interleaved with actual studies.
I mean, I don't think many pick up English straight from TV without education. But once you get a bit of education, it sort of creates a feedback loop where you are able to build up your understanding by listening people speak the language and then understanding more and more of it.
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The claim is that people learn english with english subtitles, not mandarin with mandarin subtitles.
Nitpick: There is no such thing as "Mandarin subtitles". Mandarin is a spoken dialect, not a written language. But you can have Chinese subtitles for Mandarin dialog.
This idea that languages are equivalent is bullshit and unfounded.
Indeed. The English word "language" can't even be translated unambiguously into Chinese.
Re:(nearly) everything was subtitled (Score:5, Informative)
Subtitles are almost universal in China. Every TV show has them, and they are usually part of the picture (i.e. you can't turn them off), I guess because many people won't have receivers capable of displaying soft subtitles.
It's partly because even though the spoke languages in China vary the written language is the same everywhere. It's partly because a lot of people have TVs with crap sound and poor reception, and listen in noisy environments.
Japan is a little different. Subtitles are used for impact most of the time. If someone says something funny you get animated subtitles punctuating the joke.
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Nitpick: There is no such thing as "Mandarin subtitles". Mandarin is a spoken dialect, not a written language. But you can have Chinese subtitles for Mandarin dialog.
Chinese dialects are more different than you think. It's not just the same writing system with different sounds for each character. That seems to be a common misconception, and a very interesting one. But it's readily falsifiable.
If what you said were correct, there would only be
Re:(nearly) everything was subtitled (Score:5, Interesting)
Bad argument. The claim is that people learn english with english subtitles, not mandarin with mandarin subtitles. This idea that languages are equivalent is bullshit and unfounded.
I think you've added a small mistake here - the argument is that viewing English shows with native (Dutch, or in my case, Norwegian) subtitles help, as you gain familiarity with the language and it helps accelerate knowledge growth when you start learning the foreign language in school so you have something to build on.
On a related side note: A few decades ago, Scandinavians (Danes, Swedes, Norwegian) understood each other more easily than now. There were many Scandinavian shows shown in the other countries, often without subtitles. Since then, these have largely been replaced by an explosion of shows in English - and now, many prefer to speak English with each other as opposed to their native language.
.
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I sometimes watch English language movies dubbed into Japanese. If you already know the plot and some of the lines it can be quite a good learning tool. It can also get confusing sometimes because the translations are somewhat loose... They tend to paraphrase a lot.
It's also fun to see what voice they decide to use for each character. Sometimes they translate the whole character into some local stereotype. They often seem unaware of how certain lines have become iconic or catch phrases, or put emphasis on w
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That can be a risky endeavor. In my experience Dubs are only about 80% equivalent to subs. In many cases the dub conversation will have nothing to do with sub conversation. Completely new backstory will be revealed in one, while the other is just random small talk.
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To knock some rust off my German, I watched a bunch of dubbed to German 'Married with Childrens'.
Kelly coming down the stairs is poetry in motion in any language.
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That's the same thing in Sweden - subtitles and with the shows in original language except for small kids shows. Been that way since at least the 70's.
Voiceover on shows is just weird.
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Subtitling s so much better for your general development than synchronizing. It helps you not only learn a particular language well, but also lets you understand similarities between languages and the ways people say things differently in different languages. There are many sayings that are similar all over Europe but the differences are interesting and make you learn things about the different countries, for instance. So: yay for subtitling, nay for synchronizing!
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I would not have been able to follow e.g. Trainspotting without subtitles. My English is quite good but not that much as to discern heavy accents. Another one is that sometimes the movie creators screw up the sound of the speech in one way or another so even the native speakers have trouble. Example: have the effects so loud that if you lower the volume to normal level for them you can't hear the voices....
In my experience the subtitling by default is the norm for most small countries, like mine and yours.
Re: Perfect English? (Score:5, Funny)
The elitist notion of perfect English needs to die. As long as what you speak is understood by others, it's good enough.
Yeah, kinda like programming. As long as it compiles, it's fine.
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The elitist notion of perfect English needs to die. As long as what you speak is understood by others, it's good enough.
Yeah, kinda like programming. As long as it compiles, it's fine.
Given the substantial number of serious bugs in modern software, I really, REALLY hope that you're joking.
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Woosh...
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Re:Perfect English? (Score:5, Insightful)
The elitist notion of perfect English needs to die.
There's a happy medium. You don't need to speak old queens English, but some of the completely incorrect things that come out of people's mouths that make no sense is something up with which none of us should put. (see if anyone gets that reference).
If anyone actually criticises your English when speaking it with an accent they should be hit. Unfortunately accents don't translate well online (although you can get a sense that someone may be from a specific country if they do certain grammatical mistakes, that too gets a free pass).
On the other hand when native english people come up with "I could care less" instead of "I couldn't care less", mix up "less and fewer", and don't know the difference between there, their, and they're, they deserve all the criticism heaped on them, and more.
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Since everyone speaks with an accent, you seem to be saying that all linguistic criticism should be in writing. Is that intended?
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...when native english people come up with "I could care less" instead of "I couldn't care less"...
That one started out as a New York regional expression that spread nationwide. Confusing 'less' and 'fewer' is just dumbassery.
Re:Perfect English? /1 preposition, 2 prepositions (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Why? (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, the whole "no prepositions at the end of sentences" thing was invented out of whole cloth by scholars in the 18th or 19th century who thought English should be more like Latin. Since prepositions are separate words in English rather than reflected in the morphology of their objects or some other construction, there's no particular reason for speakers to avoid separating them from their objects like occurs with sentence ending prepositions.
The same goes for splitting infinitives. They're two words in English so splitting them is a reasonable thing to do.
Re:(nearly) everything was subtitled (Score:4, Informative)
Most Germans can speak English without many problems and Germany dubs films and foreign tv shows.
If you believe that most Germans can speak English without many problems, then you need to get out of your bubble. Once you get away from the tourist areas and military bases, there are plenty of Germans that speak little or no English.
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If you believe that most Germans can speak English without many problems, then you need to get out of your bubble. Once you get away from the tourist areas and military bases, there are plenty of Germans that speak little or no English.
It used to be particularly the issue in the old East Germany. I remember being in an antique store in Leipzig with friends only to be stuck with questions when the store owner didn't speak any English. A friend found out that they both spoke Russian and carried on the conversation in that language and got the information and the transaction completed. They both seemed quite happy with the exchange and joked that they were both finally getting to use the Russian they were forced to learn in school.
I do it because I'm getting deaf. (Score:2)
And I fully expect to stop watching stuff completely when I go blind.
I blame theatre sound (Score:5, Interesting)
So much stuff is mixed for 5.1 like you're going to watch it in a sound proofed theatre with the volume set so that the action sequences will have explosions that literally thud into your chest. But you're not, you're at home, in an apartment, and/or with other people in the house that don't want to listen to the score of the movie at ear-bleeding volume from the rear speaker that is 2 feet away and then strain to hear anyone talking from the centre speaker that is 15 feet away.
You /could/ try and balance the sound for where all of 1 person can sit, but realistically people don't and it's balanced for a theoretical seat in the middle of the room where no one is sitting.
Even if you did balance it, that /still/ assumes that you want really loud things to be really loud, and you really want the music to wake you up if you've drifted off to sleep, or otherwise a real theatre (tm) experience.
The net effect is you spend all night adjusting the volume up and down and rewinding the bit you didn't hear, or you turn on closed captions and read what's inaudible.
Re:I blame theatre sound (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I blame theatre sound (Score:4, Insightful)
Boosting the centre speaker doesn’t help when it’s been mixed down from 5.1 or 2 channels.
Even with a centre speaker, the EQ of most voices is bloody terrible, lacking 2.5Khz and up, with no sibillance.
Nearly all the mix downs have low speech volume compared to fx sounds.
Re:I blame theatre sound (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah I noticed this too when I moved to 5.1. The 2 channel mix usually is fine volume wise, but as soon as you move higher, literally most AAA movies try just to push the theatre sound. on you. This is unacceptable in normal living conditions where you have neighbours and kids and you end up either using a dynamic volume adjustment (which often results in a semi acceptable soundmix but often also makes small parts really bad audiowise) and or simply readjust the volume yourself.
The mix usually is that dialogs are normal and explosions and noises should be that your glasses literally shake. If you turn down the volume you get acceptable explosion noise but the dialogs are really bad to understand especially in non perfect sound setups which is more the norm than the exception. In the end it is just easier to live with it and add subtitles to the mix.
Re:I blame theatre sound (Score:4, Informative)
That's one of the reasons. I don't use a stereo system for the TV. Many movies have a dynamic range that don't work well, you get either very quiet which is hard to hear and then a moment later something will be really loud. Can't turn the volume up because the neighbors will likely be annoyed (as am I when they do the same). I don't have troubles in theaters following what's going on but I do find it harder at home.
Plus the various accents that can be hard, and I also find myself rewinding over and over sometimes to just understand what the words were. Once I got a TV with closed captioning on I turned it on and kept it on. It's not an annoyance so I wonder why people are even worrying about it.
Re:I blame theatre sound (Score:5, Insightful)
So much stuff is mixed for 5.1
That and the fashion for people mumbling over high background noise.
I did think I was getting hearing problems a while back becaue I had so mih trouble hearing dialog. Then Iwatched an old film and it was crystal clear.
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Exactly this. I also can understand old movies perfectly well, but newer movies are getting harder and harder to follow without subtitles.
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Tour of Duty and Casuholby are big culprits. I too thought it was my lugs till I was tidying up my HDs and if it was black and white I could hear it fine.
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In fact, old US movie roles were spoken in a special "transatlantic style" that was designed to be easy to hear given the sound tech of the day, with the disadvantage of not corresponding to the way real Americans spoke at the time.
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Don't you have audio dynamic range compression available on your equipment? This was a specific design decision made a long time ago, stuff should be mixed and recorded for the perfect theater experience and it's up to the equipment in the end to control volume and importantly volume ranges.
My bluray player and my TV independently allow me to set audio dynamic range compression which fixes precisely the problem you describe.
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Unfortunately it's not nearly configurable enough to provide a useful level of compression & I still have to jack the volume up to hear mumbling or relatively-quiet dialog. I've since turned my centre front speak up (a LOT) and it's made it much better.
I initially assumed it
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It's not just that. You also get dickheads like Christopher Nolan specifically making the dialogue difficult to hear, as he did in Interstellar. For some reason he assumed that the audience knows the script as well as he does, and that they know that the mumbled dialog isn't important to the plot. In reality, people don't know whether they missed something important and find it frustrating. After "rewinding" the movie about 10 times, I finally turned subtitles on and was able to enjoy the movie.
I've seen pe
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I find this even worse when I'm watching Netflix on my PC. Many TV shows are fine, but most movies (DVDs are even worse?) I'm constantly shifting the volume between dialog I can't hear and special effects you can hear through the whole house it seems like.
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Yeah; you are absolutely right. The modern multichannel audio tracks like DTS-HD or Dolby Atmos are all super if you have the gear to reproduce them, but the simple fact is that many people will watch the film with their regular TV's stereo speakers where ideally you want a nice stereo mix with a little compression and good ducking on the vocals.
Many movies do include one for this very reason. You can very often go to the audio setup and pick the 2.0 or 2.1 mix, and you will get better results than letting
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I always hated the dialog going to the center speaker. It's rarely even a third as good as the two front side speakers, and tinny voices from a specific location really screws with the immersion for me.
Half the time I disconnected the center speaker and forced it to split dialog across the two front speakers. Sometimes I was able to force dialog across the front speakers in addition to the center... I don't recall exactly what I was doing there. I think it was some surround sound processing mode.
I couldn
How!? (Score:5, Funny)
Nah, it just got accidentally turned on, and nobody knows how to disable it!
Re:How!? (Score:4, Funny)
Ah, the sure sign that the subtitles were created with vi.
It's bad dialog audio mixing (Score:5, Interesting)
There is a simple but vexing explanation for most people watching with captioning: Dialog audio is mixed nowadays in such a way to make it have a certain sound character, not for intelligibility. Why this happens is the vexing part. Mainly it is a bass boost. People blame the actors for mumbling. Maybe but I doubt it. You do realize, don't you, that most dialog is added after the scene is shot, requiring the actors to watch themselves on a video screen and repeat the lines in a recording studio. Look up "ADR" or "looping." For real. There is simply no excuse for unintelligible dialog but the art of the day apparently requires characters to have dramatic deep, impressive voices. You might also wonder why TV procedurals have office scenes that are so poorly lit; it's for dramatic effect. Nobody has office spaces lit like that. On the death of Jerry Lewis a couple years ago I watched The King of Comedy, from 1980, in a theater. Mono sound. Not even stereo music. Perfectly intelligible. Amazing. Also, another problem is that music and sound effects are frequently mixed too high; this is a problem for people with poor cocktail party ability. The situation is so bad for TV that at least one company is selling a special speaker with signal processing to try to fix the situation. Somebody should be shot for this state of affairs.
Re:It's bad dialog audio mixing (Score:4, Informative)
ADR isn't as common as you imply, especially for weekly television shows. There's simply not time to re-dub all of the audio when production staff have to figure out which takes they're going to use and how to get the content down into a 22 minute or 46 minute timeslot, plus integrate any special or video effects.
Re:It's bad dialog audio mixing (Score:5, Informative)
You do realize, don't you, that most dialog is added after the scene is shot, requiring the actors to watch themselves on a video screen and repeat the lines in a recording studio.
No thats not "mostly" how its done. The sound engineers use mic's that only pick up the actors voices. They want the actors voices and only the actors voices recorded with the film. It is all the other sound thats added in in post. Everything.
For instance, the clank of silverware hitting a dinner plate? added in. Had to be. Wasn't recorded during filming. Footsteps? Added in. Had to be. Wasn't recorded during filming. The sound of a person ripping a piece of paper? Added in. Had to be.
If your actors have to go into sound studios and pretend to be voice-over specialists for your not-animated movie, then something went seriously wrong.
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Audio mixing isn't bad, it's simply done for a theater experience. The design decision was made early on that it is up to the end user equipment to present something that is intelligible in a living room. For that most equipment offers dynamic range compression which in the 5.1 world often includes turning down the .1 and boosting the centre channel too.
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100% agree - if I set the volume so that I can hear the quietest dialog, then after about 10 minutes there will be some really loud sound effects that will be defeaning to my neighbours a floor above me. Its like they think we are watching the series in a concert arena or something. So the result is that I set the volume so this does not happen, and then close captioning is the only way to work out what is said in the mostly quiet dialogs.
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I do the same thing. I can choose to set the sound effects and "background" music to a decent volume and not hear the dialogue. Or I can choose to hear the dialogue and wake everyone up in my house with the booming sound effects and "background" music. I choose the former and use closed captioning to get the dialog that I missed. I'd prefer to have normal dialogue volume and normal sound effects/background music, but that doesn't seem to be an option.
You get the exact dialogue (Score:3)
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That happens to me a lot. I think of it like listening to music; I may have heard the same song a hundred times but I'm still confused by the words.
I watch with captions for the speed (Score:5, Interesting)
Way back when, in late 80's and 90's, I played lots of adventure games by Sierra and Lucasarts. The dialog was never voiced until the CD-ROM era. As such, reading the dialog was like reading a book ("Look behind you! A Three-headed monkey!"). My eyes could process the information at the speed of a thought and the plot advanced.
Then the CD-ROM era hit and suddenly we had a bunch of voiced dialogue, from Z-list actors, and in many cases unskippable. As such, I have a disgust bubbling up whenever there's a game with a long dialogue scene. I play games with subtitles on, and whenever there's a dialogue, I just keep hitting space the moment I've read and processed the line and just ignore whatever the actors are saying.
This has more or less translated to non-interactive media (movies, tv shows) as well. I really don't care about the actors voices except perhaps in very emotional scenes (e.g. end of Return of the King) or where the actors really ham it up (e.g. BRIAN BLESSED). Especially in action-packed scenes it's nice to just quickly read the dialog and then concentrate on the things going on.
So, watching stuff with subtitles/captions is not so much because I couldn't make out the dialog, it's for giving me the dialogue much faster so I can ignore the articulation of actors unless there is really a point to it. Sometimes when the captions are for hearing-impaired, it also helps in drawing attention to sounds I might have otherwise ignored, especially if I cannot raise the volume. [LIGHT FOOTSTEPS] or whatever indicates that yes, there is indeed a someone stalking in the background, which I might not even have noticed otherwise, but it's clearly meant to be heard to drive up suspense.
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I play games with subtitles on, but watch movies without them.
For games it's simple - there may be noise during the dialog that may make the dialog hard to understand. The same is true for a movie, but I can rewind the movie a few seconds and listen to it again.
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Only show I watch... (Score:2)
...with closed captioning on is the Peter Capaldi era of Doctor Who, when he's interacting with Bill. Their accents are simply too different for my brain to easily handle switching from one to the other when they talk.
Lose nuance with Closed Captioning (Score:4, Interesting)
I have a daughter with a hearing impairment, so when she's in the room we turn on the Closed Captioning.
Personally, I much prefer watching without Closed Captioning because I find that I lose the nuance/emotion of what's happening on the screen. Maybe it's the distraction of moving my eyes up and down but I find that I don't get as full an experience.
YMMV.
CC (Score:3)
1) If you keep adjusting the fecking volumes so that on ordinary stereo systems the dialogue is drowned out by all the background noise or music, I can't hear what they are damn well saying.
2) You can have the TV on quieter, and watch it while doing something else, but if you miss a line, you can just look back at the screen.
3) Personally, people talking through movies - drives me mad. Rather than shout at them, I just blank them out and read the text.
4) My ex used to use subtitles because she was Italian and sometimes the dialog was too fast and it was easier for her to read the English than decipher the audio along with everything else. In Italy, this is quite common - there are lots of channels that have both English and Italian subtitles, you just press a different button.
Low quality speakers on flat screen smart TV (Score:4, Informative)
there are other reasons (Score:5, Insightful)
They might also have the name of a song that is playing.
Sometimes the subtitles have what a background character said that was really unintelligable.
It is super annoying to miss a word and have to go back 10 seconds to re-hear it. No-one says "What did he say? go back!". never happens with subtitles.
I know with certainty that I will truly have missed NOTHING.
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Yes to all of that. Especially character names (this is required for Game of Thrones).
My favorite subtitle is:
[Indistinct Chattering]
Live subtitles are both hilarious and annoying at the same time because they are terrible. Watching live traffic subtitles is the most interesting (and worst interpretation of speech ever).
Watch 20 minutes of Das Boot (best submarine movie ever) with english subtitles but also the english dub. Worst dub ever, it's then an action film converted to comedy...
Different experience (Score:2)
You can't laugh at a joke that you can't hear (Score:2)
I have several reasons why I prefer subtitles, but only in cases where it perfectly matches the dialogue... to the people who think paraphrasing in subtitles is okay, "I hate you." My reasons for loving subtitles are:
Why I Use Subtitles, Volumes 1 to 11 (Score:2)
A big part of the reason I have subtitles on is the wildly varying volume, especially during movies. And British drama producers seem to think we have decent speakers in our TVs and on our PCs and can comfortably go from a whisper to a shout without leaping for the volume control. And then there's the commercials...
But there's a special problem when watching on my PC using the WinTV app. When there are in-movie subtitles it doesn't bother duplicating them but just leaves the previous subtitle on-screen, ove
Yes... (Score:3)
I think it comes down to two things:
- People naturally speak fast, and don't always enunciate. The modern trend to realism therefore has the characters speak naturally, means that they speak fast and don't enunciate. Slow them down just a bit, and they could enunciate better.
- Sound relationships. Again, striving for realism: background sounds may dominate the dialog. Sometimes it's no different than sitting in a noisy restaurant: you can't understand your neighbor for all the other sounds impinging on your ears.
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Mr Robot (Score:2)
I have this problem with Mr Robot, which I'm currently binge-watching (when not working). Note that I /do/ have a hearing problem and also suffer from the aforementioned 'ambient noise' problem. However, I don't have a problem with most of the dialog...it's only the main character really - they seem to make his voice all 'atmospheric', and when he's talking to his imaginary friend, you don't even have lips to re-enforce the audio (which I think everyone does, so one degree or another).
It's really quite irri
Commercials will wreck this too soon ... (Score:3)
Sex Scenes (Score:2)
Background or inaudible conversation (Score:2)
Sometimes there's conversation that is in the subtitles but is either too dim in the background of the scene, or the scene just cuts off before the sentence is finished.
And that's when the background music isn't overwhelming the mumbling voice to begin with.
Mr. Simpson, don't you worry, I watched Matlock in (Score:2)
Mr. Simpson, don't you worry, I watched Matlock in a bar last night. The sound wasn't on, but I caught the gist of it.
A good idea (Score:2)
Dialects and heavy accents (Score:2)
Don't care for it (Score:3)
I can see the appeal for some people and I don't really have a problem with it for foreign language films, however for me personally I find that if the text is there, I have a tendency to reflexively read it. That puts my visual focus on the letters rather than the picture.
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Naw, there are some really strange ones that take getting used to. I'm usually ok with scots accents, but there were some shows where they were very difficult to make out. Now combine with with hearing that isn't so good, an audio system that is basically what came with the TV, and the subtitles really help out.
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Haddaway, man.
Re: (Score:2)
What is love? [youtube.com]
Re: (Score:2)
Haddaway, man.
Huh? There's no 'd' in "Haway [wiktionary.org]".
Re: (Score:2)
Don't beat some people from India or Japan speaking English. If you ever had been in a conference call with a mix from France, India, Japan and Sweden you'd would understand the headache of having a meaningful conversation. That would make at least Scottish seem like a relief.
Re: (Score:3)
You have clearly never heard the Glasgow or Newcastle-upon-Tyne accents if you think Indians speaking English are the hardest to understand
The problem with Newcastle isn't the pronunciation, the problem is that what they speak there is almost a dialect. They use a lot of words that really aren't English (gannin' doon't toon).
Some parts of Scotland, OTOH? The BBC often puts subtitles under Scots even when they're using proper English words.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Almost all TVs (and even some DVD players) have built in audio compression features.
They might be labeled as Dynamic Range Compression or Night Mode or Voice Zoom.
The basic function of compression is to make loud sounds quieter and quiet sounds louder.
This should solve the problem.
Most compressors are awful. They bring the volume up during quiet parts then slam it down again suddenly when there's a noise.
Result: The first syllable of most sentences is unintelligible in movies where there's a quiet background sound and a gap between people speaking.
(sound of crickets getting louder and louder and louder then BOom somebody posts a reply)