I like to actually concentrate on the animation rather than splitting my attention between it and text. Since I don’t speak Japanese I get absolutely nothing out of the Japanese audio voices such as the importance of inflictions in dialog. I’d rather hear a language I understand so that I can understand performances. I’ll only chose a sub if the english dub is outstandingly bad, but in most cases I find the dubs perfectly fine.
I think that while some non-Japanese speakers genuinely prefer the Japanese audio, I suspect there is a large group who only claim to prefer it for performative reasons or people who stay quiet because they know if they voice an opinion preferring dubs they’ll get dogpiled by the rest of the fandom.
FINALLY. SOMEONE LIKE ME!
Jesus fucking Christ, I don’t know how people prefer a perfectly reasonable dub to subs. Like, yeah, if the dub is crap, fine, I get it; but if it’s even halfway decent, why would you want to have to spend half your attention reading text when you could just be focusing on the gorgeous animation you probably selected this anime for watching in the first place? I don’t know, maybe this has to do with people who are slow readers vs fast readers. Maybe my mild dyslexia is the problem here. But I just don’t get it. Subs are work; why would you want to do work while watching an anime for enjoyment?
I’m a fast reader but still watch the dub unless it’s garbage, because if I want to read an anime I’ll just pick up the manga