I've heard many people complain that watching shows in a language foreign to them is difficult because they can't read the subs fast enough, or because they can't focus on what's actually happening behind the subs, or because they get just get tired of reading them. In my experience, none of these things are true if the subtitles are in a language you're fluent in. Let me explain, beginning with a disclaimer: this is my opinion. Please do not take this as a slight to anyone.
As a kid, I was a voracious reader who turned into an avid writer (if you can't tell, my vocabulary is definitely skewed towards a more bookish style, and this is why). It was the classic story of "shy kid finds solace in books"--I learned to read pretty early, and tended to try reading as fast as I could in order to find out what happened at the end of an interesting book as soon as possible. While I, like most young adults, have fallen off of the weekly-trips-to-the-library-to-get-a-million-books bandwagon because of my mounting schoolwork and other committments, I haven't lost my skills of reading at a fairly brisk pace. While I'm sure that comes in use when reading subs, I honestly don't think the words flicker that fast along the screen anyway, because characters on TV don't actually talk that fast most of the time and there's often pauses in between when they do. Maybe some people have trouble reading subs at the rate they usually go at for any number of reasons, but neither I, nor any of the people I know who also watch subbed shows have experienced substantial difficulty with this.
Perhaps the reason that I don't have issues focusing on both the subs and the on-screen action is because I always watch TV on my laptop, which has a fairly small screen, or sometimes even on my phone. My eyes never have to travel very far from the words to what's above them. Additionally, the auditory stimuli of the show augment what's happening on screen. Even if you aren't immediately in tune with the tonal differences that convey emotions in th language you're watching the show in, you quickly get accustomed to it. After all, both in personal experience as a trilingual person and according to scientific evidence (see this study), human noises are somewhat universal. It's easy to tell if someone is happy or angry, even if you can't understand what words they're saying. And, of course, background noise and the soundtrack help convey the mood and plot of a specific moment. Because my eyes don't have to move that much between the written subtitles and the characters on screen, and because the auditory aspect of a show helps set the stage of a scene, I never thought that subs got in the way of me actually watching a show.
Lastly, I personally have never gotten tired of reading the subs on a show I was truly interested in watching, and I've watched a lot of shows. If my eyes do start to hurt, it's probably because it's the wee hours of the morning, I'm not wearing my glasses, and my brain needs to sleep. In that case, it's not the show's or the subs' fault--it's mine (although I could blame the show for being too interesting to stop watching. Most of the time, that's what I do.) To be completely honest, the subs sometimes add an extra layer of enjoyment to the show. A notable example of this are subs by someone under the alias of PinkMilk, who subbed the first season of the show 2Moons. They would occasionally add hilarious commentary at the top of the screen, and, while those supertitles weren't essential to understanding the dialogue in the show, it felt less like I was watching TV alone in my apartment after a depressing day of Zoom University and more like a night in with a friend.
Often times, I think resistance towards watching shows in a foreign language, especially by English speakers, is based in the habit of mind that English is the primary global language and that everything should be accessible, with minimal effort, in that language. It's a habit of mind that has spurred abysmal, if any, second language education requirements in schools and universities all across the USA, as well as xenophobia in general. Stories of "you live in America, you should be speaking English!" are all too common among those using other languages in public, as well as irritation by those who speak only English when they go abroad and realize that *news flash* not everyone speaks English. The fact that English subs are available at all for so many great international shows is a huge blessing and an undeniable privilege already--complaining about reading subtitles becomes ungrateful at a certain point. No other language have as many shows subbed in it as English does, to my knowledge. Instead, we should use subtitles as an opportunity to 1) practice reading quickly (I promise it comes in use in higher education), and 2) embrace a different language and celebrate the global diversity it is indicative of.
An interesting take... I've never actually read someone else's thoughts on subtitles, and I find I agree, especially the last part
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