Obligatory Sold a Story podcast link.
I can’t help but feel that a lot of this is deliberate, the end result of decades of dismantling the public education system to further divide kids into the upper class in private schools, religious fundamentalists in home schooling, and everyone else abandoned to keep the population uneducated and in worse economic precarity.
Somebody please tell me that the kids are alright 
I don’t know how it’s done, but I assure you that I have tried to teach people basic tasks which amount to “read this sentence and then press the button it says to press” and been unable to even with coaching. Fully grown adult people in their 20s and 30s who have jobs and families and hobbies and all.
Well, not so much hobbies. A lot of them do nothing with their (dwindling) free time but watch TV, movies, or anime.
Honestly. If i was in that position: were i have to read a sentence and press the button i would also pretend i cant do it. Just to mess with whover is making me do it.
As for watching anime dont you have to read a lot of subtitles for that? Or do they speak japanese and chinese?
I’m not making anyone do anything, if you can’t read don’t get a job doing paperwork
Every popular anime since 1980 has been dubbed in english
Eventually. But it usually takes months, even years, for a dubbed release. Meanwhile, I can get fansubs inside a day or two of the show airing in Japan.
I’ve noticed ever since Crunchyroll became a thing and Netflix started showing anime the number of people watching fansubs has gone drastically down. And dubs are quite quick nowadays. Funimation was dubbing MHA as it was being released in Japan for instance.
Actually the number of fansubs has probably stayed the same, but more people watch anime now. MHA, Attack on Titan, and Kimetsu no Yaiba are sincere cultural forces the likes of which I’ve never quite seen before. And most people are watching them dubbed through legitimate channels. Fansubs are considered a weird nerd thing among the typical anime watcher outside of Japan. Maybe they always were?
I suppose so. But when I was in college, back in the early 00s, I had friends who were taking Japanese classes just to be part of the fansub community. We could get episodes of FMA and Bleach a day or two in advance because the show was on the UTexas intranet before it got picked up in force by the bigger file-share services.
Crazy to think you could have gotten a legit dub inside of a year.
I suppose by now English subs are just baked into the main release schedule (especially when AI can do a half-assed job of translation on the cheap). And since every major production studio has its eye on the American audience, we get some pretty high profile voice actors in modern releases. Samuel L. Jackson in Afro Samurai, for instance. Or Matthew Mercer doing Attack on Titan’s Levi Ackerman.
Even then, I tend to see a delay on the scale of months on dubs in the English-speaking markets. The official Attack on Titan Final Chapters dub release wasn’t out until a few weeks ago. I watched those episodes subbed back in… I want to say February or March?
Dont do paperwork period. Thats the devils work.
I didnt know about the anime thing. I was under the impresion that most anime was not oficially localised for english. And fans were only able to aford subs.
Much of anime is dubbed these days, esp on major streaming platforms.
Honestly. If i was in that position: were i have to read a sentence and press the button i would also pretend i cant do it. Just to mess with whover is making me do it.
As for watching anime dont you have to read a lot of subtitles for that? Or do they speak japanese and chinese?
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Is the undermining of US literacy an attempt to decisively win the subs versus dubs debate in favor of dubs?