or deal with the constantly changing subtitled terms (aberrant, abnormal, etc.)
This usually only happens if you switch sites you are watching a show on as you go along. If you always watch it from the same site then it's almost always the same sub group doing it each week, which means the terms they use are generally consistent throughout (the exceptions being the horrible english you see in openings occasionally
).
And yeah, manly voices are one of the things Japanese VA's often aren't as good at doing as American VA's, so something with a cast of fairly exclusively manly guys (like DBZ) is gonna suffer a fair bit. On the other hand what I definitely love about sub's instead of dubs is that they add a bit of age to the voices of most school aged characters; I'd rather listen to a cast of characters that sound like older high-school aged kids than ones that sound like the screeching girls and soprano guys you find on a middle school field any day.
Also: You couldn't tell that Armin was a guy at first glance?
Like I find that 99% of the time the combination of body shape, hair length, face style, and a bunch of other little details lets me tell at first glance what gender characters are, with very few exceptions (I can honestly think of only two times in shows where I haven't been able to tell a character's gender the first couple of seconds; Crona in Soul Eater and Hastur in Haiyore! Nyaruko-san). In the case of Armin I noticed (in general decreasing order of importance):
1) He doesn't have breasts.
2) He doesn't have hips.
3) He has thicker eyebrows.
4) His hair is both short and his bang line is almost totally horizontal without any separate "framing locks".
5) His lips are neither dainty nor full, and his mouth is larger than the female mouths in the series.
6) He was wearing guy's clothes when he first showed up.
Put them all together and, BAM, guy. Albeit a guy with some feminine features (notably his overall facial composition, his eye shape+size combination, and his longer hair on the sides+back), but definitely a guy.
Is it just me that doesn't have any trouble identifying anime genders at all? Is this a widespread problem that I've somehow missed out on?