3 Pros and 3 Cons to Watching American/Japanese Dubbed Cartoons in your Adopted Language
In many languages of the developed world, there are Looney Tunes, Disney, Pokémon and more! But when and how should you use them?
Pros:
If you’re B1 or higher, you may be able to pick up on subtleties about how certain character or place names are translated. Two particularly well-translated names are “Donald Duck” and “SpongeBob SquarePants”, among many others. If these are well-known figures, it behooves you to at least recognize their names in your target language because you never know when they may come up.
Especially among younger audiences, a lot of memories were created through these cartoons and you may hear them referenced like many native/homebred cultural references. On my mom’s birthday I posted a caption (in Danish) as a joke referencing the Team Rocket motto (Vi beskytter verden mod det rene kaos. / Og smålige hensyn lægger vi bag os). A month later I was watching a Let’s Play video in which the hosts explicitly dropped the exact same line. If these things don’t interest you, no worries, I’ve encountered native speakers who know very little about their native language’s pop music / TV culture. How do I know? I used to be one of them…despite being an English speaker, I had a lot of catch-up work to do in high school and in college, not also to mention the road after. Didn’t make me any less of a native English speaker.
As these are made for younger audiences by and large, there are a lot of context-based clues. Children’s media is made for kids who aren’t fully fluent yet, and so if you can get the whole plot despite not getting every word, congratulations, you’re pretty much at the understanding level of a native-speaking young child (probably around 5-6 years old). Because of their target audience, the narrative will often be buffered with visual cues. (E.g. a flashback in which everything the character says is depicted through a montage.) In media aimed primarily at adults, this isn’t necessary, but in children’s media all over the world, it is necessary.
Cons:
Localized media has virtually nothing in the way of teaching you about the culture of the language. Compare, for example, Duck Tales to the (in)famous John Dillermand cartoons, as the latter is Danish, there will be cultural references that can’t be one-to-one rendered into a language like Spanish (yes, it was localized in that language). And Aladdin, for example, is filled with American celebrity references. Now there are some times, like the Finnish dub of Aladdin, in which the American references get rendered masterfully into ones fully at-home in the localized language that take on a life of their own, but don’t count on it happening most of the time.
Some learners at the lower level may feel self-conscious about the fact that they cannot understand cartoon voices of certain characters. (This is true in non-localized media, such as Sesam Stasjon’s Bjarne Betjent, whose very high-pitched voice gave a lot of my students headaches but me…not so much). I hate to break it to you, but unless you meet very eccentric people in real life or work in theater or for children, the only place you’ll need the skill of understanding wacky cartoon voices is…you guessed it…in cartoons.
Action sequences = time in which you aren’t really listening to anything deep in the language. Although “floskeln” (filler words and their ilk) are 100% necessary for any type of fluency. The absolute worst case scenario is minutes at a time with no dialogue. You can just skip ahead, but with some episodes of Pokémon, you may not press the X button thinking that you’ve had your fill of immersion unless you count a brawl between Pikachu and Rowlet “immersion.” (It can be entertaining for some. The rule is to always too what you enjoy.
See you all in September!