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Back in 2008 I watched subs with a dictionary app, now I just vibed through 3 episodes on 2x speed
I remember when fansubbing was the only way to get anything outside of Naruto on Toonami. Back then I'd have my laptop open with a Japanese dictionary site just to pause every 10 seconds and look up what 'senpai' actually meant in context. Fast forward to last night, I put on the latest season of some isekai while eating cereal at 1am, ran it at double speed, and didn't miss a thing. The whole experience went from homework to background noise. I think what really changed was Crunchyroll adding those pop-up glossaries around maybe 2016, so I stopped pausing and started just letting the flow carry me. Now I barely remember character names but I can tell you the exact episode where the animation budget drops. Anyone else feel like they lost something when subtitles got too easy, or is that just nostalgia talking? Does anyone actually still pause to look up kanji or am I the only old head who did that?
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susanh4622d ago
The 2016 glossaries were a game changer for sure, but I still catch myself grabbing my phone for kanji when a show throws in a historical reference or a pun that the subs clearly gave up on. I remember spending 20 minutes on one episode of Welcome to the NHK trying to figure out why the main character was yelling about a specific brand of instant ramen, and that deep dive made the whole scene hit way harder. Now I breeze through a whole cour in a night and couldnt tell you a single thing about the worldbuilding. So the real question is this: when you stopped pausing, did you actually stop caring about the story, or did you just stop noticing how much you were missing? Cause I think for me, the loss wasnt about subtitles being easier, it was about me being okay with not understanding everything.
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