this post was submitted on 28 Mar 2024
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Unpopular opinion: Subtitles detract from the watching experience more than mishearing some words. tv / movies are a visual medium, the image on the screen is primary to it. And it doesn't matter how fast you read, the subtitles still degrade what you get out of watching the show. If your eyes are constantly darting down to the words and then back to the image then you're missing meaningful things that are happening in the image. And the text physically blocks part of the image. And the words appear on screen at a different timing from how the actors speak the words, which further worsens the emotional impact you can receive.
Yes, i agree, dialogue mixing has gotten very bad and it sucks to miss words that are said, but imo subtitles ruin the experience even more
I get what you're saying and I wish I didn't need subtitles, but it's kind of hard to understand what's going on when 90% of the dialogue in modern shows is unintelligible mush.
One thing I’ve done to train my listening in Spanish (not my native language), is I watch TV and listen to podcasts, but I only put one earbud in at a time.
So I listen to the dialogue with just one ear.
I’ve found that when I do this for a while, then switch back to two ears, I can understand so much better.
What genre are you watching typically? I find that very few shows and movies give me this problem.
Actually... Have you considered it's your speakers? I have this issue with music. My high fidelity speakers are perfect, but I've got a cheap anker speaker that's nearly impossible to listen to lyrics on. It's all bass, and no treble.
I mostly watch anime these days so I'm reading subtitles regardless. The dialogue sounds pretty clear, though; I may not know what the words mean but I can easily make out the syllables being spoken. American stuff, though... If it was made in the past 15 years then it's probably going to be full of mumbling and too-loud background noise. I suppose it's possible that my friends have cheap speakers, but I remember sometimes having the same issue at the theater, back when I still went out to see movies.
More recently, I've been watching old British and American shows that a friend has been streaming. Stuff from the 60's and 90's. Didn't have any issues understanding what was said.
It's really easy to watch the movie, and to catch that one word in the sentence you want to look at without losing anything in the frame. People who watch with subtitles don't read every sentence, more like 30 words per movie, and subtitles and scenes don't change that fast, you have ample time to do some back and forth between the image and the text.
It never works like that for me; if the subtitles are on, I can’t distract myself from them whatever I do and end up reading every sentence.
Skill issue
This but unironically. You learn over time how to read subtitles without having to focus on the text. If you’ve ever tried speed reading, it’s a similar skill. You’re not really reading each letter of each word, you’re just kind of absorbing the pattern of the text to help inform how you interpret what you’re hearing.
With worse hearing loss you’ll obviously not be able to rely as much on the audio and will have to focus more on reading, but in those cases I don’t think anyone would argue the subtitles aren’t improving your experience of the video.
If words flash in front of my face, I end up reading them
That's a dumb dismissive response. It's a passive entertainment medium, it's not supposed to require any skill or effort at all. The subtitles being on screen makes the experience significantly less enjoyable for many of us, and that's all that needs to be said for it to be 100% valid
"skills issue" is just a meme that people say, I think he was just making a joke, it's like the git gud of this generation.
Whatever noob, just get good
Yeah, I feel like people in this thread are really slow readers. After a while, you learn to do both at the same time. it's really not difficult. I just watched Zone of Interest and Anatomy of a Fall. Both are in foreign languages (to me, an English speaker), and therefore were entirely subtitled. Both are beautifully filmed, and I had no problem completely appreciating that while still being able to understand everything being said. It was trivial.
What? How would you even do this? Glance straight to the one word you need, somehow locating it without reading the other words?
Yeah, it's pretty easy to do. The sentences always lag behind a bit, and you know which part of the sentence you want to reread. Movies just don't move that fast.
Your eyes can also understand words without reading them, that's how youre able to skim to a known part of a text you want to reread, in a book for example.
I'm with you. If you like subtitles, you do you I won't judge, they just personally drive me nuts. I try to ignore them when I watch with someone else, but they pull my eyes away from the movie. Plus they spoil jokes and ruin the timing.
Also, maybe I have super-ears, but I really haven't struggled to hear dialogue at all in the movies I constantly hear people complain about (mostly Nolan's). I'm genuinely confused about that controversy, because they sound fine to me.
I haven’t struggled to hear dialogue in movies either. And I have the opposite of super ears. I had serious issues understanding any speech at all when I was about ten.
I think people are socially anxious en masse these days and are relieved they can abstract themselves away from the human aspect of the story by not having to watch the action.
I totally agree. The subtitles are so obtrusive that I’m unwillingly forced to look at them and it distracts from the video. They also completely ruin comedic timing. My wife, however, needs the subtitles on, so I live in a subtitle household now.
I’ve never had a problem generally understanding the dialog even with the terrible sound mixing, but the subtitles have ruined a bunch of jokes and completely block things I need to see on the screen very frequently.
Yeah I prefer when the subtitles are like half a second late so it doesn't ruin the comedic or dramatic impact of every line.
Or, perfectly timed. I’ve seen captioners do this before: if a character pauses, what they say after the pause doesn’t appear until they say it.
This! A lot of human-generated subtitles are excellently timed. Auto-generated or live subtitles suck.
Wish I could adjust caption timing on more devices/apps.
Yeah I agree, I think subtitles make the viewing experience worse. But the solution is better mixing, not just no subtitles
I don't mind using subtitles when I watch movies in my language but when it comes to anime or movies in other languages I prefer subtitles because it's better than not understanding a single word.
I watched Dark in the original German, don’t speak a word of German, and didn’t use any subtitles.
It was a really interesting and satisfying experience. There was no point where I didn’t understand what was going on.
As an autistic person I felt very gratified to realize I’d built up my social skills to the point I can grok a story without anyone explaining anything, even the characters.
80% of the story of that show is told by the casting department. Brilliant TV!
For me, it's several things:
As others have mentioned, sound mixing sucks on a lot of newer movies. Watching a movie with a pleasant max volume could render dialogue inaudible. Holy crap, that last batman movie was hard to watch.
While I watch movies, there are often a lot of things happening around me. The dog might be playing around, my girlfriend is having a phone conversation or there are noises from the kitchen. I am not great at mentally filtering out sounds, so subtitles help a lot.
I live in a country where subtitles have been around my whole life. Now that TV is on-demand rather than linear TV with hardcoded subs, most services enable subs by default, and it doesn't really bother me.
That’s why you make them flashy colors and put them directly in front of the action!
Finally someone with the courage to say it! Although if you like subtitles you do you, but I agree with this take, I feel like I get more into the movie without subtitles (which leads to obsessive rewinding if I miss some dialogue but that is the tradeoff). If a movie or show is egregiously hard to understand/ heavy accents then you might need em on.
Apple TV has a feature if you miss something you ask Siri “what did he say?” It’ll rewind like 10-15 seconds, turn on subtitles for that 10-15 seconds, then turn them back off. It’s super handy
That's a fantastic feature! I hope other streaming systems copy it
I have been doing this manually for years without knowing that Siri could have been doing it for me jfc.
I agree if you can otherwise hear fine, but many people who do use subtitles/captions don't use them out of choice, they use them due to disability: if I don't have captions I will miss 80% of what is being said, rather than the 5/10% that an abled person would.
This emotional spoiler-ing certainly happens! (Though I personally don't mind it too much) What is particularly frustrating is when the captions don't match what they are saying. Filmmakers, PLEASE don't do this, I understand that you may want to tweak some lines afterwards, but this just makes it so that my brain has to do additional audio processing, (which is the entire reason for captions in the first place) meaning I either have to mute the movie, or slow it down so I can keep up!
Oh for sure! If a person has a hearing impairment then that's exactly who closed captions were invented for.
I’m right there with you
Hate hate hate subtitles. I 100% agree sound mixing is absolute shite now, and I definitely understand why some people need them (as someone who has audio processing issues myself I really do get it)
But I refuse to watch things with subtitles. They’re way too distracting. Either I’m reading them of I’m trying to ignore them but all my brain is saying is ‘don’t look at them don’t look at them don’t look at them’. Like if I wanted to read something, I’d have a book in front of me
I wonder if sound mixing being shit has anything to do with the uniquity of closed captioning these days.
Exactly my experience too
Fucking hate subtitles, the moving words attract my eyes and then i just end up reading and missing the scenes.
Here’s a fun fact: autistic people’s attention is more strongly captured by movement than neurotypicals’
For this reason, as soon as I’m less lazy, I want to start a web dev standard where you can turn off all animation that’s self-timed.
I cannot read a website if things are moving on it. If there’s an image carousel that moves on its own, I have to delete it with dev tools, along with all other self-initiated animations, before I can read anything on the page.
ADHD is the same way too
Thats interesting, I dunno if im on the spectrum but the subtitles definitely capture my attention, im also usually baked so i zone out and end up reading
As an autistic person, I literally can't look at repeating animated GIFs or images with short loop cycles. When people post them in chats, I have to scroll past them, or even scroll up and not look at the new posts until I know the moving images will be above the window threshold once I scroll back to the bottom.
Exactly. Cinematographers spend so much effort to put everything in the scene in exactly the right place, lit exactly the right way.
Watch, for example, this breakdown of how Akira Kurosawa frames everything in a scene to draw your eyes in certain directions. If you look away and don't see the character looking left and right with shifty eyes, you miss a key part of what's happening. Or, take some of the more famous individual frames in movie history and imagine them with white text on top of them. It's especially bad when it's a very dark scene, or a scene where the key elements are in the shadows.
Not only that, but sometimes the subtitle ruins the suspense. Like, in the audio version there's a faint sound you can't quite make out, but that's how it's meant to be. But the subtitle says something like [sound of coffin opening].
It does suck that a lot of dialogue mixing these days is terrible. But, I'd rather have to go back and listen again if I missed something than have the entire movie downgraded by constant subtitles flashing up on-screen.
Besides, I think you need to train your ear. It's the same way that people have trouble with foreign accents. When they haven't heard them before it's initially hard to understand. But, over time, you learn to hear that accent better. Similarly, I think people who always use subtitles are losing and/or never developing the ability to hear the dialogue properly, so they have more problem with it, so they continue to rely on the crutch of subtitles. Even though movie dialogue mixing is significantly worse these days, it's very rare that I actually have trouble hearing and understanding the dialogue. It's an effort sometimes, and it's annoying that they're so badly mixed, but I can still understand what's being said and don't need to either go back and listen again or turn on subtitles.
Can we take a moment to appreciate the irony of the first image in the header of that site you linked having white text superimposed over it?
You can see how it detracts from the image though, can't you?
Oh bro, you’re preaching to the choir here. I absolutely hate subtitles. Even with foreign content it’s a shitty requirement to engage with the media, although preferable to dubbed content for me in most situations. I have an Apple TV, and tvOS allows you to set subtitle size, color, border type, background type, and brightness, which really help make them much more bearable in these unavoidable situations.
That said, I’m not hating them as much as I thought I would in Shogun, probably because they’re edited in to the master by the producers and they actually look decent compared to that harsh sterile blinding typical white type of subtitle that most included forced subs use.
Yeah, sometimes they're unavoidable, Shogun is ok, but I still think everything would be better without them. I wonder if there's a version of Shogun without subtitles for people (not me) who understand both English and Japanese.
On the subject of Shogun, one thing that's hilarious: the English is supposedly Portuguese. It took me a while to figure that one out. Like, when they're speaking Japanese it's Japanese, but when they're speaking English, it's supposed to be Portuguese. At least, I think? Although there were some scenes early on that I think where they were speaking English. I guess there's no way you could get away with a TV show where the two actual spoken languages were Portuguese and Japanese, with everything subtitled for English speakers. But, the way they did it is really weird. Like, the actual Portuguese speakers sometimes speak English with a Portuguese accent, and the Spanish speakers speak Spanish-accented English, which is maybe supposed to be Spanish-accented Portuguese, but the main character speaks a variant of British English, but it's supposed to be accentless(?) Portuguese?
Yeah, the whole Portuguese but spoken in English thing is kind of ridiculous I guess. I did read an interview about that though and they wouldn’t have been able to find enough actors who spoke both Japanese and Portuguese to the level they would need.
And I’m not sure about the subtitles for people who can understand both languages. I do know that the subtitles aren’t “forced”, they’re mastered in to the video. I pirate my shit, if they were forced subs my player would use my system settings for size, positioning, color, opacity, etc. I would assume that the English portions are subbed the same way for the show in the Japanese market, but idk.