Word.
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Not really! I mean my wife had trouble with Bubbles but I found him perfectly comprehensible. His heroin addict white friend did end up at points completely incomprehensible but that was when he was completely off his head on heroin.
Maybe your town didn’t have a heroin epidemic
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Ah, the infamous Telarc 1812.
WARNING! The cannons of the Telarc Digital “1812” are recorded at a very high level. Lower levels are recommended for initial playback until a safe level can be determined for your equipment.
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My father taught audio engineering for decades. He told the story of a high end monitor¹ salesman at a trade show who was showing off. Someone dared him to demonstrate with the Telarc 1812. So he did, and turned it all the way up to demonstrate the crispness of the strings in the quiet bit. Then… not even a pop. Just silence.
So he plugged in another pair of $10,000 each monitors, and did it again. Fused the voice coils.
1] Monitors are speakers, in the same way that a Bugatti is a car. Your home hifi setup has speakers. Your professional recording studio control room has monitors.
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Japanese has way, way more homophones than English, and words that are not often used in conversation are more easily recognizable in kanji form (the kanji have meaning apart from the sound, and you can’t exactly sound words out).
I mean, one can certainly understand what’s being said without relying on subtitles, but it’s a matter of how carefully you’re listening and background noise.
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After my mum’s funeral in London in 2017 (she was originally from Cork), we all went back to my sister’s house for refreshments. At one point, my teen son was chatting to my cousin Robert from Cork - Mum’s nephew. After about 5 mins he came back over, and I said “all good?” - he just shrugged and said “eh, I got about one word in five” 
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Since lockdown(s), I’ve been gradually figuring out how many of the ADHD boxes I tick. I occasionally have audio processing oddities (crowded environments with lots of people and noise), but subtitles are something else for me.
Foreign language material subbed? Not a problem, I can deal with that just fine.
English language clips subbed in English? The worst thing ever (I’m looking at you pretty much every bloody Instagram creator). I can’t not look at the caption, even though I can understand every damn word. It’s maddening. Even things like news clips on the BBC, with ‘captions on’ as the default that has to be changed for every clip I play 
. It completely distracts me from just watching the video.
I get that accessibility is an absolute good, but subs that can’t be turned off are a bloody nightmare.
< /rant >
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This, exactly, for me.
I’m all for subtitles: I obviously use them regularly when watching non-English film or TV, and I agree with many of the advantages espoused in the discussion above for using them in English too, but I simply can’t: they tear me away, I miss out on visuals (and hence, often, an important part of the art). Is there some secret to overcoming this? 
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I have some foreign films where the only subtitle available is English [SDH]. bloody annoying, especially when the director is trying to be subtle.
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Bowers and Wilkins uses the term “Domestic Monitor” for its home HiFI speakers. They sound nice (great imaging), but it’s marketing through and through.
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When you watch Airplane with English subtitles turned on, and it displays them over the translated-in-story-subtitles, I wonder what it says they’re saying.
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Ditto! It can be incredibly frustrating for me and those around me. In my case, I can be having a normal conversation in a normal-background-noise room, then my wife turns her head to pick something up (or I take one step further away and happen to get closer to a fan) and I miss half a sentence.
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Subtitles by AI: (The literal word-for-word subtitling from their native Jive tongue.)
Subtitles by a human: [Jive] (The English equivalent phraseology.)
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can you understand what he’s singing?
i think Sandler nails it there, because that’s what I hear when Vedder sings.
could just be me… 
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I have less problem understanding Vedder than Bob Dylan…
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(It’s not just you.)
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Yes, that is true and I had not thought about it. However, it’s variety shows which have so much subtitling in Japan. Films and dramas usually rely on voice alone. I actually think the variety shows do it to add to the on-screen drama because the rest of the show is basically a bunch of celebs sitting around and shooting the shit about the topic of the moment.
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