I enjoy watching subtitled films when I speak the language to at least some degree, because I get the interest of doing the 'back-translation' from the meaning of what was said to identifying the actual words used -- something in Japanese might just as well be dubbed for all the difference it makes to me. (Subtitled Swedish was about the furthest I got from comprehensibility -- and I have a feeling it was a subtitled Swedish *silent* film, so I was comparing the written version in the two languages via my intermediate knowledge of German ;-)
It's a salutory experience to realise that when I have the [English] subtitles on a French film, I can pick up pretty much every word of the original French, but as soon as the subtitles cut out for any reason I really start to struggle to follow the dialogue -- knowing the *meaning* of a phrase in advance is sufficient to narrow down all the possibilities enormously, which gives an entirely spurious impression of fluency.
cough* the Miraculous Ladybug English dub changing Chat Noir's "I thought I lost you." in the original French to "That was a wild ride!" *cough*
That's a fairly major alteration of implication...
I'll pretty much only go on fanfiction.net if I've had a specific fic recommended to me that's only found there, which is often the case for Phantom fic.
I only go on AOL if I've met with a specific link pointing there -- the navigation is pretty rudimentary without JavaScript (the mobile FFnet is actually quite accessible), it has a fairly well-earned reputation for being full of mindless smut, and the tags are pretty useless, because people tag for *everything*. (An R/C tag might indicate that Raoul and Christine are married in the first chapter before she sees the error of her ways and escapes from her abusive husband, for example...)
But I can eliminate over 90% of what is posted to FFnet at a glance, either from tags or summaries; I once spent an evening working chronologically backwards through about three thousand stories over a period of several years, because there was a suspicious gap in my favourites list (mostly culled from looking at other people's favourites) and I wanted to see what I'd missed. I found *two* stories that were good enough to add :-( (Plus, to be fair, a couple that I had already from that period.)
I did get a horrendous case of fanfic indigestion ;-p
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momijizukamori
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Date: 2020-12-14 11:59 pm (UTC)It's a salutory experience to realise that when I have the [English] subtitles on a French film, I can pick up pretty much every word of the original French, but as soon as the subtitles cut out for any reason I really start to struggle to follow the dialogue -- knowing the *meaning* of a phrase in advance is sufficient to narrow down all the possibilities enormously, which gives an entirely spurious impression of fluency.
(I've got an archive DVD of the French TV production of Leroux's "La Poupée Sanglante", which is very good -- better than the original book, which gets rushed and facetious in the second half -- and because it wasn't commercially marketed to England, it only has French subtitles. On the other hand, because it's 'classic' TV from the 1970s, I can actually understand almost every word of the dialogue unsubtitled because it is all beautifully enunciated... but I come unstuck the instant a working-class dialect pops up. This is the point at which I have to enable the subtitles so that I can *read* what was supposed to have been said ;-p)
That's a fairly major alteration of implication...
I only go on AOL if I've met with a specific link pointing there -- the navigation is pretty rudimentary without JavaScript (the mobile FFnet is actually quite accessible), it has a fairly well-earned reputation for being full of mindless smut, and the tags are pretty useless, because people tag for *everything*. (An R/C tag might indicate that Raoul and Christine are married in the first chapter before she sees the error of her ways and escapes from her abusive husband, for example...)
But I can eliminate over 90% of what is posted to FFnet at a glance, either from tags or summaries; I once spent an evening working chronologically backwards through about three thousand stories over a period of several years, because there was a suspicious gap in my favourites list (mostly culled from looking at other people's favourites) and I wanted to see what I'd missed. I found *two* stories that were good enough to add :-(
(Plus, to be fair, a couple that I had already from that period.)
I did get a horrendous case of fanfic indigestion ;-p