Encourage children to watch shows with subtitles 

Vitac has an article highlighting the growing demand for subtitles in English language media, which may come as a surprise if you typically associate subtitling and captioning with foreign films.

Hollywood is embracing native languages in many of its foreign shows. The Japanese characters in Shogun speak Japanese. The Mexican protagonists in Narcos communicate in Spanish. The English dub for those shows won’t ruin your enjoyment. However, it breaks the immersion.

Listening to foreign characters speak in their native tongues while you follow along via subtitles gives you a greater appreciation for their performances. However, the growing demand for subtitles has nothing to do with foreign films or even anime’s exploding popularity.

Many viewers are choosing to enable Same Language Subtitling (SLS); I love SLS. First, many movies and shows have poor sound mixing. You are watching a scene in a movie but you can’t hear the dialogue because the voices are too low. So, you increase the volume.

Three minutes later, something explosive happens, such as a character screaming, a bomb going off, or a car colliding with a tree, and you almost go deaf because the sound is suddenly too loud.

You lunge for the controls to kill the volume before your neighbours complain. And then, seconds later, the audio falls and again. Rather than increasing the volume again, I use subtitles to track the conversations. Sometimes, the sound mixing is fine but the characters are speaking in ridiculously thick accents. Guy Ritchie films struggle with this.

Also, if English is not your strong suit, characters like Spencer Reed (Criminal Minds) may confuse you unless you engage subtitles because they speak at the pace of a Gatling gun. Additionally, subtitles are a godsend if you watch videos in public. I work in the middle of downtown.

You will go deaf while trying to use your headphones because you can’t compete with the noise in that environment. So naturally, I try to limit my viewing to anime during the day because I can keep the volume at the lowest possible setting while using subtitles to follow the conversations. Sometimes, I remove my earphones altogether.

And if I’m trying to watch YouTube videos in a taxi, I mute the sound on my phone and read the subtitles because, again, earphones are a health hazard in that environment, and I’m not one of those inconsiderate maniacs who force the entire taxi to listen to what I’m watching.

If you typically avoid subtitles, this is as good a time as any to jump on that bandwagon. But what if you can’t read subtitles?
What if you’re incapable of watching the events on the screen while simultaneously tracking the words at the bottom?

Well, you are in luck. Scholars have found that subtitles are actually beneficial. Gemma Goldenberg from Research Hub noticed that 94 percent of children in one study could keep up with shows that included subtitles.

Admittedly, this was only true for shows whose subtitles were at a low level of reading difficulty. Nonetheless, if a child can watch a show while reading subtitles, so can you. More importantly, less fluent readers performed better in word identification and comprehension tests when researchers exposed them to shows with subtitles.

Slate reported in September 2023 that India had passed a law that compelled mainstream TV shows in the country to include subtitles because they enhance reading and language development.

If your young ones are always watching cartoons on a TV or tablet, educators will encourage you to turn the subtitles on. You don’t have to tell your children to read them. That will happen instinctually and in the process, their literacy and speech comprehension will improve.

What does that mean for you? If you can’t read subtitles, watch more shows and films with subtitles. Over time, it will become easier. Stop being lazy.

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