>>>>>>>>#define here "Netflix, not TV"
>>>>>>>>Which I do (or sometimes just turn off the subtitles and enjoy the language).
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>Movie theaters, DVD rental, cable.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>No, except, like I said, Netflix. The cinemas (sorry, but I still expect to see actors and the curtain in a theatre) suffer from the same shortsightedness, only slightly less.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>>Back to your point, why is it so surprising that the TV channels in a predominantly English speaking country predominantly air programs in English?
>>>>>>
>>>>>>It was definitely not the point, but I'll recap: there are probably about twenty countries where English is either the only or one of official languages; all of them have televisions (though, you'd never know, would you?). None of that is shown here, EXCEPT UK. Clear? That was my question, why only UK?
>>>>>>
>>>>>>And, BTW, most of the world watches a lot of footage made in a foreign language. Are they smarter, suffering, uninformed, delusional, misguided, what?
>>>>>
>>>>>Unfortunately, most Americans' early experiences with subtitling (I'm talking late 60's - mid 70's) were Hong Kong Action or "Artsy" European. Given the quality of film that most of these were on, subtitles were VERY difficult to read, so Americans tended to stay away from them in droves. This lead the movie making world to decide that Americans didn't like subtitles and so we had voice-dubbing (hate-shiver).
>>>>>
>>>>>Personally, I prefer subtitles - I have a problem when the words that are coming out of the actors mouths don't agree with the movements of the mouth and completely lose any type of "suspension of belief' required for many of the 'fantastical' settings of some of the movies I like.
>>>>
>>>>Hate to disagree, but it's the 'wonderful' dubbing that makes those Chinese Kung-Fu movies great! Well, that and the sound effects.
>>>
>>>One of my party pieces is doing those - moving the lips 90 to the dozen, for c. 10 seconds and just saying, eg "What? You don't say so?"
>>
>>Back when dinosaurs ruled the world and before cable, I had the night shift with our dog business and we had a Spanish language local station in Houston that played the Hong Kong Kung-fu movies dubbed in Spanish. At 5:00 am, when you're on your 2nd 24 hours, hearing spanish coming out of chinese faces would just skitz my brain.
>
>I know exactly what you mean. A few years ago I was in Quebec City and we went to a chinese restaurant. Our waiter was, of course, Chinese, but when he came over to our table and spoke, he spoke French. Clearly that shouldn't have surprised me, being in Quebec City and all, but it did. Context is everything, and I guess there were competing contexts in that instance. To this day, I wonder if he spoke French with a Chinese accent.

Even weirder - was he speaking French-Canadian with a Chinese accent? French Canadian sounds quite different from the original. I suppose it's equivalent to an American-Chinese speaking English.

Some years ago we arrived in St Denis, Montreal and stopped to get a hotel room for the night. The proprietor was Indian-Asian and we conversed for some time in French. After a while he asked where I was from. When I told him Brighton, England he revealed (in English) that he was from Shoreham, just a 10 minute drive along the coast from Brighton. Small world!