Ask Lemmy

Subbed for stuff i'm actively watching, dubbed for when i just want something for company while working on other stuff. But tbh dub these day is kinda good

Most of the time is sub. The anime I always watch in dubbed is Yugioh. I like Dan Green's voice acting for Yami Yugi better than the original Japanese version. I grew up hearing the dubbed version and I also like Joey's New York accent

I watch subtitled.

Subs for almost everything, including things like donghua or live-action stuff, it just always feels way better to me.

The only exception I can think of where I preferred the dub is Dragon Ball. And I've seen Princess Mononoke in Japanese, English, and German, and enjoyed all versions a lot. Outside of anime, also SpongeBob and The Simpsons in German, but that might just be bc that's how I grew up with them.

I always watch subs, that thing they do in dubs where they say words in a weird cadence to lipsync better is really offputting to me.

I always watch subbed.

On one hand because I just like the Japanese language.

But also because there are no dubs in my native language, and whether English or Japanese... it's all just foreign languages anyway. So I don't see a banefit to watching dubbed. Sure I'd understand what's said, but it's really not that hard to read subtitles. In fact, information tends to stick better for me when I read it rather than hear about it, so I only see benefits for myself with subtitles.

I just started watching some anime and was thinking about this!

I watched a few different series in English, dubbed, and they seemed good... then I tried another "classic" dubbed in English (Attack on Titan) and I didn't like it. I had a gut feeling that it would be better w/ Japanese and subtitles, so I decided to try it, and it was almost a different show... much better. Not only did the voices make more sense, the words are very different, almost completely different on some occasions.

I'm scared to rewatch the shows in Japanese that I already watched in English, haha.

I totally understand about not wanting to read subtitles, I don't necessarily want to, either, but it can completely change the show and be the difference between it being good and not good... not to mention the creators' original intentions...

I hate how bad the dubs sound but when Im watching anime I'm playing Minecraft or an elder scrolls on my other monitor and I don't understand japanese so dub it is.

Since I started watching subbed like 15 years ago, dubbed sounds so unbelievably ridiculous. It hurts my ears when I hear dubbed Anime.

Dubbed... in Spanish

Subs, always. I don't really consider dubs an option, unless there's really, really no alternative. The biggest reason for that is undoubtedly growing up and living in a country where subtitles are the norm for foreign media, but I do think I have some more concrete reasons for it.

Take the line "Hey! I'm walkin' here!" Probably, you know exactly what I'm talking about and how that line is delivered, even if you've never seen Midnight Cowboy (I haven't). But I can almost assure you that if dubbed in Japanese, it would be thought of as just another line and would never become iconic. If you remove the language and the cultural context it's spoken in, all that's left is the literal meaning. And the same is true the other way around, if something is written in Japanese, then it's going to typically be written with the assumption that it's going to be spoken in Japanese.

Also, people working on the actual show are going to be involved in the recording in the original language, so it's typically going to be closer to their intentions. To use an extreme example, Tomino Yoshiyuki (most famous for Gundam) is such a ~~control freak~~ perfectionist, that you can tell he's directing from the way the voice actors deliver the lines. But the dubs of all the works he's worked on over the decades are all going to have different ADR directors with no input from him (and even if he did have input, he probably isn't fluent enough in English to do so effectively), so there's no consistent (figurative) "voice".

But most importantly, dubs just make it impossible to do any compensating for losses in translation. There's a whole spectrum between "This language just sounds like gibberish to me" and "I'm fluent enough in the language to not need a translation", so as long as you're not in the former extreme, there are still things you can pick up on: first person pronouns, copulae, honorifics, dialects, levels of formality etc. And especially Japanese is, I think, a pretty translucent-sounding language to people who are used to European languages, so you end up picking up on patterns even if you're not actively trying to learn it.

Yes, both.

I watch dubbed, it doesn't bother me that they pronounce things stranglely, I'm use to it, I'm Hispanic and live in usa T.T

Subs, Japanese voice actors just have a completely different style. And I'd probably need subs for English dubs anyway (like I do for English-language live action movies/shows), because English is not my native language, so there's barely an advantage.

Subs; aside from being better quality typically and me reading pretty fast, I also understand enough Japanese to get what's going on. If you do it for over two decades, you get used to it.

Ironically, my Japanese wife sometimes makes me watch dubbed because she sometimes works with English VAs as part of her localization job, lol.

I haven't watched anime for quite a while, but when I do, I've certainly preferred subbed.

That being said, I can imagine computer voice synth hypothetically getting to a point where I'd prefer dubbed.

Dubbed.

If I wanted to read, I'd read a book.