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> And finally, if you're a non-English speaker, Blu-rays will include a dubbed version in your native language. This is a big plus for the kids, especially when

> And finally, if you're a non-English speaker, Blu-rays will include a dubbed version in your native language. This is a big plus for the kids, especially when they're as young as mine are now. I grew up in a country where English is not the primary language spoken and when I was young all the cool shows and movies were in English. As a kid this was a huge incentive and went far above and beyond any education I had in English in my home country. I can’t overstate how valuable this has been to me as an immigrant to an English speaking country.

theodric 2y ago
I have this general feeling based my 21 years bouncing around Europe that subtitle countries have better English than dub countries, although I'm not proposing that the link is causative
- noduerme 2y ago
  My perception from traveling to 40+ countries is that countries where dubbing is common do so for the reason that the population is more illiterate and lower-educated in general, and that trend just extends to having less fluency in other languages.
  - Novosell 2y ago
    Germany and France, famous for being lowly educated and illiterate.
    - NemoNobody 2y ago
      I didn't kno that.
  - redleader55 2y ago
    I don't think that is true. France is a highly educated country, while for them dubbing is a part of culture. I would say the same applies to Japan and China. I'm neither one of these nationalities.
  - gpvos 2y ago
    It's just smaller vs. larger languages making dubbing more worth the cost. Education in France and Germany isn't worse than elsewhere in Europe. People there do speak English slightly worse and with a stronger accent on average.
  - buran77 2y ago
    There are many reasons for the distinction, culture and money being chief among them. Dubbing is far more expensive than subs. So countries like Germany or France would be more likely to afford it. They're also countries which try to promote the use of their language for historical and national pride reasons (as opposed to Anglicization of everything) so it makes them even more likely to have dubs. They also had dubbing for so long that it became cultural and maybe even expected. Contrast that with countries like the former Eastern block which had no foreign material to speak of until the '90s, and when they finally did they couldn't afford dubbing, so they went with the quick and easy route of subs. They also probably have fewer aspirations for the promotion of their own language and priorities practicality over pride, embracing foreign languages faster.
  - meigwilym 2y ago
    Did you visit Britain?
- GaryNumanVevo 2y ago
  It's definitely a contributing factor. Living in the Netherlands, Dutch kids learn English through Youtube and Tiktok. Since it's a small country there's less Dutch spoken online, as opposed to German which has dubs for a lot of movies / TV shows.
seszett 2y ago
The author is apparently a Dutch speaker, and English fluency really isn't a problem in Flanders or the Netherlands. I think the language is close enough to English that it's easily picked up even watching only dubbed movies as a kid. In contrast friends of mine who mostly watched French-dubbed movies when they were small (because they were close to the border and Club Dorothée was better than whatever was available here) didn't learn much French, but they're fluent in English today (and that's with mandatory French lessons at school, much earlier than English lessons). So English-version of movies is really unnecessary for kids here IMO. In my family we only watch French or Dutch (dubbed or original) movies with the kids and I think that's fine.
- phito 2y ago
  As a French-speaking Belgian living in the Dutch speaking part, in my experience and opinion, it's the opposite. Most French speaking folks can't speak a word of English because everything is dubbed, they are never exposed to the language. Meanwhile, there's no Dutch dubbing (because there's not enough Dutch speaking audience to justify the cost) and they all have fantastic English skills.
  - seszett 2y ago
    I'm also a French speaker living in Flanders with a Flemish partner, and children who speak both languages. I'm pretty sure the ease of speaking English for Dutch speakers comes mostly from the closeness of the language (as evidenced by my comment on people who watched French-dubbed anime as kids, not Japanese original or English-dubbed). And TV content for children (including De leeuwenkoning or Een luizenleven, to take examples from the article) is almost universally dubbed in Dutch as far as I can tell. My personal opinion is that watching movies in English is really not as useful as people think it is, it does help once you already know the language but children just don't pick up a language by watching movies in that language without having already some basic knowledge of that language. IMO (but it's starting to get off-topic) it's more generally Latin languages that are a hindrance for their native speakers for some reason, and globally Latin speakers are just always bad at learning other (non-Latin) languages, especially at speaking them. But it's not because they're watching Le Roi Lion rather than The Lion King.
fhe 2y ago
for me it was computer games, specifically Civ 2. Imagine playing that as a second-grader with zero English. But I had strong motivation, and ploughed through the game, dictionary in hand.
- anthk 2y ago
  Same here. Either the original Japanese release, or the English fandubbed JRPG release for emulators. The choice was clear there; and my English skills skyrocketted with Chrono Trigger.
- foobarian 2y ago
  At least you had graphics. Zork I did it for me, I still remember my first word: "forest". Never could figure out wtf a "stiletto" is though, it wasn't in the ancient dictionary I had at the time.
  - anthk 2y ago
    As I Spaniard I could still guess 'forest' could be somehow related to 'forestal', which is something related to the woods/countryside.
ThatMedicIsASpy 2y ago
When I was 14-18 I watched anime (japanese dubs with eng subs). The censorship of the german dubs got me into it and I hated german subs plus the english subs were faster and the germans often were double translated (jap > eng > ger). My english grades were very good thanks to it. Now I'm exposed more to english (movies, shows, internet, os) than german I've switched to german subs and started watching anime again 20 years later. I keep fucking up numbers as german numbers are one-hundred-five-and-fifty instead of one-hundred-fifty-five and too many of my thoughts are in english. There is a small movement trying to make both acceptable https://zwanzigeins.jetzt/ https://zwanzigeins.jetzt/
- ryukoposting 2y ago
  Would you have recommendations for an English speaker trying to learn German? Where do I go to find anime with good German subtitles? Or, maybe even a German dub?
  - RGamma 2y ago
    proxer.me is a prominent German anime/manga community (needs login for seeing episodes). German-language stuff is typically licensed and needs to be watched elsewhere though.
  - ThatMedicIsASpy 2y ago
    Netflix should have plenty? Anime seems like a weird choice. I would suggest the German public broadcast channels on Youtube with subtitles instead of Anime. https://www.youtube.com/@Handwerkskunst/videos https://www.youtube.com/@Handwerkskunst/videos https://www.youtube.com/@ARDRoomTour https://www.youtube.com/@ARDRoomTour
- left-struck 2y ago
  Yeah my native language is afrikaans which also has the 4 and 20 for 24 vibe. For me the difficulty is was with times tables strangely enough, as long after I started thinking primarily in English I was still doing times tables in afrikaans
- 2y ago
quickthrower327 2y ago
Furthermore, being forced to read subtitles can greatly increase literacy.
michaelmior 2y ago
I've found that most streaming services tend to have a good collection of subtitles and audio in various languages as well although I haven't compared that to physical media.
wccrawford 2y ago
As an American that only knew English, Japanese media that was only available without English was my #1 motivation to learn more Japanese. By the time I was low-intermediate, basically everything was fan-subbed day 1, and it killed a lot of my motivation. There were still light novels, but the ones I really want to read are still quite a bit above me, and I have barely progressed since then. And we're on the verge of AI being able to translate everything in basically real time, spoken or written. I agree with your estimation of the value of media you want that's not available in your language, in regards to language learning. I'm a little sad that that motivation won't exist for many people in the future, but also happy that they can just enjoy the content.
- jimbokun 2y ago
  It's interesting to me that in spite of everything you point out, demand for learning English (and other languages to a lesser effect) as a Second Language seems higher than ever.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

theodric 2y ago

I have this general feeling based my 21 years bouncing around Europe that subtitle countries have better English than dub countries, although I'm not proposing that the link is causative

noduerme 2y ago
My perception from traveling to 40+ countries is that countries where dubbing is common do so for the reason that the population is more illiterate and lower-educated in general, and that trend just extends to having less fluency in other languages.
- Novosell 2y ago
  Germany and France, famous for being lowly educated and illiterate.
  - NemoNobody 2y ago
    I didn't kno that.
- redleader55 2y ago
  I don't think that is true. France is a highly educated country, while for them dubbing is a part of culture. I would say the same applies to Japan and China. I'm neither one of these nationalities.
- gpvos 2y ago
  It's just smaller vs. larger languages making dubbing more worth the cost. Education in France and Germany isn't worse than elsewhere in Europe. People there do speak English slightly worse and with a stronger accent on average.
- buran77 2y ago
  There are many reasons for the distinction, culture and money being chief among them. Dubbing is far more expensive than subs. So countries like Germany or France would be more likely to afford it. They're also countries which try to promote the use of their language for historical and national pride reasons (as opposed to Anglicization of everything) so it makes them even more likely to have dubs. They also had dubbing for so long that it became cultural and maybe even expected. Contrast that with countries like the former Eastern block which had no foreign material to speak of until the '90s, and when they finally did they couldn't afford dubbing, so they went with the quick and easy route of subs. They also probably have fewer aspirations for the promotion of their own language and priorities practicality over pride, embracing foreign languages faster.
- meigwilym 2y ago
  Did you visit Britain?
GaryNumanVevo 2y ago
It's definitely a contributing factor. Living in the Netherlands, Dutch kids learn English through Youtube and Tiktok. Since it's a small country there's less Dutch spoken online, as opposed to German which has dubs for a lot of movies / TV shows.

seszett 2y ago

The author is apparently a Dutch speaker, and English fluency really isn't a problem in Flanders or the Netherlands. I think the language is close enough to English that it's easily picked up even watching only dubbed movies as a kid. In contrast friends of mine who mostly watched French-dubbed movies when they were small (because they were close to the border and Club Dorothée was better than whatever was available here) didn't learn much French, but they're fluent in English today (and that's with mandatory French lessons at school, much earlier than English lessons). So English-version of movies is really unnecessary for kids here IMO. In my family we only watch French or Dutch (dubbed or original) movies with the kids and I think that's fine.

phito 2y ago
As a French-speaking Belgian living in the Dutch speaking part, in my experience and opinion, it's the opposite. Most French speaking folks can't speak a word of English because everything is dubbed, they are never exposed to the language. Meanwhile, there's no Dutch dubbing (because there's not enough Dutch speaking audience to justify the cost) and they all have fantastic English skills.
- seszett 2y ago
  I'm also a French speaker living in Flanders with a Flemish partner, and children who speak both languages. I'm pretty sure the ease of speaking English for Dutch speakers comes mostly from the closeness of the language (as evidenced by my comment on people who watched French-dubbed anime as kids, not Japanese original or English-dubbed). And TV content for children (including De leeuwenkoning or Een luizenleven, to take examples from the article) is almost universally dubbed in Dutch as far as I can tell. My personal opinion is that watching movies in English is really not as useful as people think it is, it does help once you already know the language but children just don't pick up a language by watching movies in that language without having already some basic knowledge of that language. IMO (but it's starting to get off-topic) it's more generally Latin languages that are a hindrance for their native speakers for some reason, and globally Latin speakers are just always bad at learning other (non-Latin) languages, especially at speaking them. But it's not because they're watching Le Roi Lion rather than The Lion King.

fhe 2y ago

for me it was computer games, specifically Civ 2. Imagine playing that as a second-grader with zero English. But I had strong motivation, and ploughed through the game, dictionary in hand.

anthk 2y ago
Same here. Either the original Japanese release, or the English fandubbed JRPG release for emulators. The choice was clear there; and my English skills skyrocketted with Chrono Trigger.
foobarian 2y ago
At least you had graphics. Zork I did it for me, I still remember my first word: "forest". Never could figure out wtf a "stiletto" is though, it wasn't in the ancient dictionary I had at the time.
- anthk 2y ago
  As I Spaniard I could still guess 'forest' could be somehow related to 'forestal', which is something related to the woods/countryside.

ThatMedicIsASpy 2y ago

When I was 14-18 I watched anime (japanese dubs with eng subs). The censorship of the german dubs got me into it and I hated german subs plus the english subs were faster and the germans often were double translated (jap > eng > ger). My english grades were very good thanks to it. Now I'm exposed more to english (movies, shows, internet, os) than german I've switched to german subs and started watching anime again 20 years later. I keep fucking up numbers as german numbers are one-hundred-five-and-fifty instead of one-hundred-fifty-five and too many of my thoughts are in english. There is a small movement trying to make both acceptable https://zwanzigeins.jetzt/ https://zwanzigeins.jetzt/

ryukoposting 2y ago
Would you have recommendations for an English speaker trying to learn German? Where do I go to find anime with good German subtitles? Or, maybe even a German dub?
- RGamma 2y ago
  proxer.me is a prominent German anime/manga community (needs login for seeing episodes). German-language stuff is typically licensed and needs to be watched elsewhere though.
- ThatMedicIsASpy 2y ago
  Netflix should have plenty? Anime seems like a weird choice. I would suggest the German public broadcast channels on Youtube with subtitles instead of Anime. https://www.youtube.com/@Handwerkskunst/videos https://www.youtube.com/@Handwerkskunst/videos https://www.youtube.com/@ARDRoomTour https://www.youtube.com/@ARDRoomTour
left-struck 2y ago
Yeah my native language is afrikaans which also has the 4 and 20 for 24 vibe. For me the difficulty is was with times tables strangely enough, as long after I started thinking primarily in English I was still doing times tables in afrikaans
2y ago

quickthrower327 2y ago

Furthermore, being forced to read subtitles can greatly increase literacy.

michaelmior 2y ago

I've found that most streaming services tend to have a good collection of subtitles and audio in various languages as well although I haven't compared that to physical media.

wccrawford 2y ago

As an American that only knew English, Japanese media that was only available without English was my #1 motivation to learn more Japanese. By the time I was low-intermediate, basically everything was fan-subbed day 1, and it killed a lot of my motivation. There were still light novels, but the ones I really want to read are still quite a bit above me, and I have barely progressed since then. And we're on the verge of AI being able to translate everything in basically real time, spoken or written. I agree with your estimation of the value of media you want that's not available in your language, in regards to language learning. I'm a little sad that that motivation won't exist for many people in the future, but also happy that they can just enjoy the content.

jimbokun 2y ago
It's interesting to me that in spite of everything you point out, demand for learning English (and other languages to a lesser effect) as a Second Language seems higher than ever.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]