I like watching television with the captions on. I have had roommate's who can attest that, in fact, the closed captions are always on with my TV. Oh, I do turn them off occasionally, usually during football games, when they have an annoying tendency to run at the same level as the scoreboard, meaning I can't see how the other games are going. For the most part though, they stay on.
I can't say why exactly I started doing that. I think it might have been so I could watch TV and do homework simultaneously. I can get pretty easily distracted by noise, and the captions eliminate that issue. Except sometimes, I keep the sound and the captions on, like when I've watched foreign films, or animes, but also just for your everyday shows like the Simpsons.
Sometime yesterday afternoon, it occurred to me that maybe comics are related to it. Comics have pictures and words, together on the same page, but no sound. So maybe it's a mixture that I'm comfortable with based on those past experiences? I'm used to having to try and distinguish emotion, or intent, based on the illustration that accompanies the words, so perhaps it's not that big a deal to read the words on the screen and try and interpret meaning from what the actor is doing as they speak (gets a little harder when the captions are running noticeably behind the actors).
On the other hand, my friend Alex enjoys comics (or he used to), but he's not the overall reader that I am. And unlike me, he's not a big fan of reading while watching TV, as I learned when we tried to watch Excel Saga together. The English voice for the main character makes my head hurt, so I wanted to watch it in Japanese, but he had no interest if he had to read subtitles, and it's hard for me to do anything else with that sqwaking going on in the background, so we eventually agreed to watch something we could both enjoy in English instead. So maybe it's less a comprehension of words and pictures together, and more a reading thing.
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2 comments:
I've preferred watching the TV with captions since before I started getting into comics. Personally, I just find I pick up on more when I read the words. I sometimes miss things when I only listen.
I'm not a good conversationalist (even when I do manage to talk to people, I constantly get made fun of for saying bizarre non sequiturs, even though they make perfect sense to me), but I can go on for hours on AIM--maybe there's a corollary?
bradbury: That's interesting. I think I'm a pretty fair conversationalist when it's face-to-face, but I'm terrible at talking to people over the phone, and I don't instant message much. So I don't know what conclusion to draw from that.
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