I am a non-subber. My second language is usable but sort of wonky Spanish from my childhood in Texas. My “thing” is finding ways to convey the intangibles of another language in English.
People whose foundation of another language starts in a classroom and THEN moves into an “immersion experience” (a year abroad as an exchange student or whatever) speak and understand and pay attention to different things in different ways than people who learn a second language “on the streets” and then work to broaden and deepen their technical understanding…
For me, joy in watching shows on Viki comes when I read Engish subs that are charming to me because they are perfectly, elegantly understandable, clear, and well-crafted in English AND at the same time, by word choice or order, reveal the inner workings of another language, of the people who speak it, and of the culture it comes out of.
Spanish I will claim as my “second language” because as I was learning English, a lot of Spanish slipped into my brain as well from my environment. But I didn’t live in Texas long enough that, for a whole lot of basic vocabulary in Spanish, I don’t have an interior pause for sorting out what it is and how it’s used and what it means, it’s just there in my head, I “get” it automatically on some level, and I don’t even need in some cases to know what the English equivalent to have a gut awareness, an emotional response, a sense of deep familiarity.
Every other language I know about, there are snippets that affect me in the same way as Spanish, but just snippets, little bits, so I rely VERY heavily on subs to help me have an experience in which the English subs kind of map onto the other language so that . . . I’m not standing outside of that other language looking in, I am standing in the doorway smelling food and watching relationships unfold and being allowed to experience a bit of the life behind the language.
The very best subs on Viki are like that. Other subs that are good or even fair I cherish because they give me information that teaches me things I never knew about the world around me.
I just like to learn stuff and go, “Wow, how awesome is that?” And thanks to English subs, I do a lot of both.
, no telling the true reason.
Anyway, don’t worry about it, as choitrio said, “It’s like a reminder from Viki to ‘play with other kids too’”
Love reading your posts here in the community discussions on any thread. 