English is my first non-native language that I can read and understand reasonably well, though I could never speak or write sharply because I have never been in an environment that required me to do so. Through years of consuming YouTube, I’ve developed the ability to understand English, not extensively, but enough that I don’t need to pull out a Google Translate.

Historically, for about 4-5 years, I had been a heavy English caption user. That really propelled me to get a grasp of English. However, I have noticed recently that with the caption taking up space on my screen sitting and popping trying to get my attention, I couldn’t focus on the content itself. It might be a person trying to talk to me, or a graph that’s displaying informations, I just kind of ignored them. And I thought, that’s kind of a bummer.

Once I could understand roughly what the narrative has to say without a caption, I think that’s the point where I should quit abusing caption all the time. I would now solely use caption in the instance where there are a heavy journalistic narrative going on that I could never completely catch because I were not born using the language, or at best trying to see the word that sounded foreign to me. Now the screen is less cluttered, and I could really see the person’s expression when they’re talking.

This is really the experience I’ve always been dreamed of since the day that I decided to consume English contents. I think the same could be said for watching a film in foreign language, though I’ve never been fond of watching films myself.