Subtitles are a necessity when watching a movie in a foreign tongue, but what if you want to make sure you don’t miss a word regardless of language?

There’s a case to be made both for and against the practice. For one thing, regional accents can be as difficult to discern as foreign languages — an American watching, say, Trainspotting without subtitles is sure to miss a few words here and there given the cast’s heavy Scottish accents and frequent use of colloquialisms. Others find always-on captions distracting, as they’d rather focus on the image than text on the bottom of the screen — especially if they can’t help reading dialogue before it’s actually been spoken.