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English is not my native language, and whenever I can watch TV or movies, I'll always try to watch it with English subtitles. This is because: - As I said, Eng
by sombragris 1y ago
English is not my native language, and whenever I can watch TV or movies, I'll always try to watch it with English subtitles. This is because:
- As I said, English is not my first language. Thus I'm not that proficient in listening.
- Actors nowadays speak with worse diction. Sometimes they just mumble something unintelligible, no matter how much you rewind and replay.
- The sound balance makes voices to come off as drowned by the environmental sounds and the soundtrack. This is very different from, e.g., classical movies where sound and diction was very clear almost at all times.
- Some accents are very hard to parse. Canadian folks, for example, make it very difficult to be understood.
So, the subtitles feature are a lifesaver a lot of times.
- andrewmcwatters 1y agoIt's just native speakers in general across any language. I swear I can barely understand native speakers in my second language because they all mumble or liase into fractions of words that are understood only if you've learned the specific mumbles of that accent. "Welyuno..." "Wellyouno..." "Well youknow..." "Well, you know..." But if you didn't know "welyuno" in English, tough luck you'll understand it in as a second language learner.
- watwut 1y agoOnce you are used to how natives speak, these stop being mystery. Basically, you learn to understand real speach instead of just "learner" version.
- sombragris 1y agoI'm replying to this comment as well to its parent. You're both right as for colloquial speech. But we are talking about movies. Actors used to study elocution and diction techniques to polish their speech. As I said in my comment, this was apparent in older movies. Now, they don't even care about this, it seems.