Beginner immersion – Dual subs or watching twice? If the latter, is a certain direction better, e.g Eng sub then JP sub, or other way round?

9 comments

1. The more comprehensible the immersion, the better. Since there’s near zero comprehension at beginner levels normal immersion isn’t useful so go for the watching twice. First time, use English subs to get the comprehension, then second time with Japanese or even no subs to get the immersion.

   Basically, try to catch words and phrases you know and maybe even connect new words to the English meaning. The rewatch, you’re primed to pick up those phrases but also try to watch and enjoy. You might even try to “read along” with the Japanese audio and subs.

   Note: If you’re doing this with movies dubbed in Japanese, likely the Japanese subs will not match the audio. Probably best to not use subs on the second watch in that case as it’ll likely be distracting.

2. Whenever I come across dual subs, no matter my literacy level in Japanese, my eyes tend to naturally read English first. Personally, I watch with Japanese subs whenever possible or with none at all.

   The actual problem is that English-Japanese translation is a localization. Especially when it comes to phrases like よろしくお願いします、お邪魔します、お世話になります, お疲れ様でした etc, or honorifics. Those are usually translated either almost too literal or are too localized or completely omitted; yet alone dialects.

   So, watching it with English subs first and then Japanese will give you a hint what it’s about but don’t take English subs as “ah, so that’s what it means in Japanese!”. That’s what people around here mean with comprehensible input; you need to actively listen to grasp the Japanese
   meaning and not compare the English translation.

   (Just a side note: I watched 氷属性男子とクールな同僚女子; The ice guy and his cool female colleague; with a friend lately and so many nuances and jokes and the entire charme of the series get lost in translation; inevitably so. It’s funny when you read the subs but it gets downright hilarious when you understand Japanese and Japanese culture. Btw, both manga and anime are one of my おすすめ; especially for learners, I feel the Japanese in the anime and manga are excellent immersion material)

   I’d opt for Japanese subs if available and if you’re literacy level allows it, for getting the
   most out of your immersion time!

3. I personally started with only Japanese subs and have occasinally experimented with dual subs but only after already having watched something with Japanese subs. So if you have the motivation to watch both subbed versions you should definitely watch Eng sub first and then Jpn subs and try to catch as much as possible when watching with Jpn subs. The other way around doesn’t really make sense. Dual subs is very dangerous as you will naturally default to just reading the English subs, so I wouldn’t do it, but you can experiment with it if you want. If watching the same episode back to back feels too boring and you don’t mind getting spoiled on the story, I would just read the Episode synopsis in English before watching the episode with Japanese subs, this way you will already know all the vital plot points before hand and can then focus on how this is being convayed during the episode. Also if you choose easy content a lot will be clear from the visuals, Terrace House has a lot of talking without context clues so it can get a bit hard at times, slice of life anime or something alike would be more approchable as a beginner, but no good if that doesn’t interest you.

4. I’d recommend a video with a script to go with it. So read the script with an e-reader (LingQ or some other e-reading software) then go back and listen to the video over and over. Repeat this process many times on many different videos and you’ll start to see a lot of progress with your listening & comprehension.

5. I’d go with dual subs and you can use something like mpv to toggle the English subs on whenever you need to so that way you don’t end up ignoring the Japanese ones.

   Best bet imo would be to start with something like the comprehensible input YouTube channel since they introduce and reuse words in each video

6. I’ll vouch that dual subtitles works really well for me, I focus on the Japanese and when I run into a Kanji or word I don’t know, I reference the English subtitles quickly. You can learn a lot without pausing at all.

7. controversial but very important: if you’re a beginner just focus on anki

8. JP subs only with pausing and lookups

9. I use the Iago extension and watch dual subs, then rewatch japanese no sub so I can get straight listening practice. I’m very new (only a month in), but this is helping me a lot to recognize patterns, words, and particles.

   Iago is awesome because it will quiz you on stuff from the episode. You can hover over the subtitles and a definition will pop up, then you can save the word and go to their website to study and be quizzed on it later.

   The downside of iago is that they use a lot of kanji in the quizzes, but they are in beta so are probably adding furigana to that soon. The actual subtitles have furigana