> 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.
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
> German numbers are one-hundred-five-and-fifty instead of one-hundred-fifty-five and too many of my thoughts are in english
Both are fine in the UK, though the "five-and-fifty" form is somewhat old fashioned. My Grandmother used to say numbers like that, especially for time. I refer you also to "Sing a Song of Sixpence"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sing_a_Song_of_Sixpence
I agree, and it is an unusual turn of phrase these days, but I think it's the scenario here that would be confusing. The number 68 bus is a label rather than a quantity, which makes a difference.
Maybe this one of those sites that don't let you view them from outside their intended region, but I'd use 403 for that, so I assume it just got hugged
Funny side note google translate maims that large first line translating it (correctly but also incorrectly) as "Also twenty-one and not just twenty-one!". Just a funny note where the translation is content correct but not context correct.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
As a counterargument, my German I learnt from Derrick I believe is much better than the English of equal educated German people I have met. I'm pretty convinced that the dubbing in Germany has a lot to do with it.
As a 70's/80's kid, there wasn't much dutch language kids-tv, but there was a lot of english language kids-tv (mostly british). And I think I learned most of my english from saturday morning cartoons. English in school came later.
Shame it doesn't work that well for learning japanese, because I do still watch a lot of anime (subbed), but still only know a handful of japanese words.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.