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Comment by sjtgraham | Hacker News Reader

I expected this thread to have been hijacked by complaints of a video of exclusively white men and "No man is an island" in massive letters.

Anyway, this looks pretty interesting but the main takeaway from this for me is how disadvantaged non-English media are, i.e. I found it very difficult to pay attention to the subtitles for very long, eventually losing interest completely. At least when they're in English I can tab over and passively listen while I get on with whatever I'm doing. I'm sure Yandex doesn't care as presumably all of their customers are Russian, but it raises the issue that these kinds of videos are indulgent at the best of times, and the information conveyed per time is very poor, the main reason I find conference talks hard going too.

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The majority of stimulation we receive is just waste of time by your philosophy.

You're right about one thing though, my American (and British, Australians, Anglo Canadians among others from the same language group) friends are lazy as hell to read subtitles generally, the majority never ever getting interest of learning another language since almost anyone learns some English, which really puzzles me.

I'm not a bad Spanish speaker, also have been trying to learn Mandarin. Native English speakers are used to hearing things aloud, because everything we consume is in English. If English is not your native tongue it's understandable that you would be more used to reading subtitles, having perhaps grown up watching subtitled Hollywood films for example.

The brain optimises itself to tasks it performs most often, so understand that reading subtitles for an extended period of time would be more mental effort to someone not used to doing that than it is for you. I think you're ignorant for equating that with laziness.

> The majority of stimulation we receive is just waste of time by your philosophy.

Yep. I'm wasting my time jamming along to a Joe Satriani CD on my guitar right now. Totally wasting my life.

Maybe ignorance yes, the fact is I do not share their experience, I only watched dubbed stuff in either Hebrew or Portuguese until my early teens although I learned Yiddish first. It was from mainly 2000 to 2002 that I learned to read subtitles and after that I never needed it anymore unless in a language that I don't know.

Good to know you're not in that second group.

I not a fan of Satriani but keep rocking.

I'm sorry for you for all the extraordinary films and media you have missed. Mandarin is spoken natively by twice as many people as English, then Hindustani, Spanish and Russian. Notwithstanding the best of Japanese, French, Italian, German and Swedish cinema.

Well, you are not alone in this as an English speaker. Trying to see a popular yet non-dubbed film or television program in France, Spain or Germany is an exercise in itself.

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