Fruits Basket... Anime on free to air

[GoktimusPrime]

What is the quality of the subs if they're subbed?

I used to prefer the fan-subbed free versions as opposed to the official DVDs back when I did watch anime (only watching One Piece now).

That's because fan subs are often better translations because a lot of official subtitles are what fans call "dubtitles" -- i.e. they simply type up the dub script and use it as subtitles. Even with a limited understanding of Japanese you can sometimes hear when the subs are wrong, whereas you can't discern this with dubs.

Fan subbers shouldn't be distributing their stuff after the anime licence gets picked up by a Western distributor (like ADV). Some unscrupulous fansubbers do this, and I would encourage people not to support them. I used to be part of a fansubbing team, and we always tried to be ethical in our fansubbing - only ever fansubbed stuff that wasn't licensed by any Western company, but as soon as the licence was obtained, we'd cease and desist all work and distribution of that animé we were working on. The last one I worked on was actually Ghost In The Shell Stand Alone Complex -- we were about half way through that series when the licence was picked up, and a LOT of translation work had to be completely scrapped. That was damn hard too cos the show uses a lot of very difficult technical jargon... I actually had a native Japanese speaker next to me and the two of us worked together translating the script -- and unlike some other animé we had NO copy of the script to read! We had to purely translate by ear! I've never translated anything harder than that... and so much of that effort went to waste because we were always translating several episodes ahead of what we'd released -- and when ADV picked up the licence, all the eps that we had already translated but hadn't been converted into subs and released yet were deleted.

So yeah... I don't access fan subs (I just watch my anime raw ), but for those of you who do, I would encourage you to access the ones from more ethical fansubbers who don't touch stuff that's officially licensed in the West. I know there's always a lag time between when the licence is obtained and when it comes out officially in the West... but that's just the way it works.

[SuspectimusPrime]

So yeah... I don't access fan subs (I just watch my anime raw )

I would really like to know more Japanese by the next time I visit Japan

They are dubbed. And the sbs ones I used to watch were dubbed too. I suspect the reason the NHK news is raw is too much of a pain to add subs/dubs for every day. Especially since most people that would watch them are most likely speakers of Japanese anyway. Although I do like watching the russian news...

Russia Today rocks Along with Keiser Report and most Cross Talks