Just realized I've been watching subs wrong for 3 years

Last week I went to a local anime meetup at the library and someone pointed out I was reading the subtitles like a book left to right. Turns out I was missing half the on-screen text because my eyes were scanning the wrong spots. I've been watching anime for 3 years this way and never noticed. The guy showed me a trick to focus on the center of the screen and let your peripheral vision catch the subs. Has anyone else had a weird habit like this that took forever to fix?

3 comments

3 Comments

hannahw3025d ago

The center screen trick is legit and that's exactly how I fixed my own mess with subs. I used to read the subs line by line and my eyes would drift to the bottom of the screen, so I'd miss entire lines if multiple characters talked fast. What helped me was picking an action heavy show like One Punch Man and rewatching a few episodes while forcing my eyes to stay glued to the middle. After a week of that, reading subs on the edges just clicked naturally and I stopped needing to look down.

logan7052mo ago

My buddy kevin used to watch subbed shows on his phone in landscape but had the subs turned off by accident for like six months. He thought all those Japanese dramas were just really into dramatic pauses and grunting. When he finally figured it out he got so mad he threw a pillow at his cat.

hayden_butler272mo ago

Oh man, that's wild but honestly I get it. I did something similar with fighting games for like a year before I realized I was reading the move lists wrong in tutorials. I kept trying to do a quarter-circle forward but my brain was reading it backward the whole time. The center screen trick you mentioned is pretty solid, I had to train myself to stop looking at the bottom left corner when things got intense. What worked for me was watching with the subs turned off for a few episodes to break the habit, then turning them back on but forcing myself to keep my eyes locked on the middle of the screen. Took about a month but now I catch way more detail in the animation and don't miss half the jokes.