Right- I wonder if anyone else has had similar experiences. I’m studying Japanese and practically all of my exposure is to audio/mp3 lessons. I just occasionally watch something in “full version” Japanese to gauge my progress. When Japanese was still very new to me my brain would turn off/give up during “complex” conversations (not about quantum theory but just all in general) and only occasionally pick something up. However, I’ve just tried watching an anime with subtitles and it simply wouldn’t do that- I could understand quite a lot with the english subtitles assisting me (yeah yeah but what I mean is that mosta lot of the words were already familiar) so my brain got tired after like 10-15 minutes even with the english subtitles simply cause I could no longer “tune out” the Japanese as jibberish cause now it’s only “half jibberish” hehe.
I had similar experiences with German watching “der Untergang” 