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Comment by enraged_camel | Hacker News Reader

I actually got annoyed at my roommate last night because he was washing dishes while I was trying to watch a movie. The sound of running water totally messed up my ability to understand the movie (unless I turned up the volume quite a bit, and we have neighbors...), so I had to pause it until he was done.

I always thought it was just me - I'm not a native speaker - but it's interesting to know that it's an actual medical condition.

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I'm not convinced that I suffer from this but for years now I've enabled subtitles/captions in order to follow along. Helps with ambient noise, accents in the dialogue, otherwise inaudible dialogue, plus sometimes there's interesting ad-libs/changes from original script.

Might not help for a non-native English speaker unless the titles are in your language though, YMMV.

I do this too, a habit picked up when my kids were little and I didn't want to wake them up with loud movies. I'm surprised now, when I turn captions off, how much harder I have to concentrate on what I'm watching in order to keep track of what's going on.

I have the opposite problem. Whether voice+caps are in my language, or the caps are a translation to my native language with a spoken (foreign) language that I understand fine, I CANNOT stop myself from reading every word of the captions, so it really limits my enjoyment of the video portion of the film.

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