Re:English has been my pain for 15 years (2013)
by song on Saturday November 28, 2015 @09:56PM
(#10643540)
I think the biggest impact of subtitling instead of dubbing is when kid shows are subtitled. Small kids cannot get the mean from the subtitles since they cannot read or if they can often cannot read fast enough. This means that those kids get a crash course in the language by associating actions with English words and getting used to the pronunciation of the English.
Kids also tend to have more patience when it comes to watching something that they do not fully understand due to language issues so they're less likely to give up.
Subtitling movies and TV shows essentially gives more opportunities to encounter linguistic input. However, as the viewers are able to get the meaning from the subtitles only, they don't necessarily PROCESS the foreign language. Some do, so the mileage varies a lot.
(Watching without subtitles will force you process the meaning – or if the difficulty level is too high, just frustrate and ignore it. Or process partially.)
I find that even more than TV shows, kids these days are learning English from games – in Finland, they don't translate games at all, so there's even greater incentive to actually try to understand the English input.