Anime with subtitles are that when the audio has not been altered meaning the spoken language remains in Japanese while dubbed anime overhauls the dialog, but lip sync can suck if that detail is overlooked since the source material for the lip sync animations regarding mouth movements as they are originally in Japanese. The thing is, when a character’s name begins or ends with ryu / ryo , they often struggle to correctly pronounce that in the English dub.
Subs, always. I don’t really consider dubs an option, unless there’s really, really no alternative. The biggest reason for that is undoubtedly growing up and living in a country where subtitles are the norm for foreign media, but I do think I have some more concrete reasons for it.
Take the line “Hey! I’m walkin’ here!” Probably, you know exactly what I’m talking about and how that line is delivered, even if you’ve never seen Midnight Cowboy (I haven’t). But I can almost assure you that if dubbed in Japanese, it would be thought of as just another line and would never become iconic. If you remove the language and the cultural context it’s spoken in, all that’s left is the literal meaning. And the same is true the other way around, if something is written in Japanese, then it’s going to typically be written with the assumption that it’s going to be spoken in Japanese.
Also, people working on the actual show are going to be involved in the recording in the original language, so it’s typically going to be closer to their intentions. To use an extreme example, Tomino Yoshiyuki (most famous for Gundam) is such a
control freakperfectionist, that you can tell he’s directing from the way the voice actors deliver the lines. But the dubs of all the works he’s worked on over the decades are all going to have different ADR directors with no input from him (and even if he did have input, he probably isn’t fluent enough in English to do so effectively), so there’s no consistent (figurative) “voice”.But most importantly, dubs just make it impossible to do any compensating for losses in translation. There’s a whole spectrum between “This language just sounds like gibberish to me” and “I’m fluent enough in the language to not need a translation”, so as long as you’re not in the former extreme, there are still things you can pick up on: first person pronouns, copulae, honorifics, dialects, levels of formality etc. And especially Japanese is, I think, a pretty translucent-sounding language to people who are used to European languages, so you end up picking up on patterns even if you’re not actively trying to learn it.