The first time that you watched the Japanese version?

[The Iron Fjord]

For me, it was in late 2006, and I was relatively new to YouTube. I searched up some DBZ clips, and I found a 3 minute video of Goku and Freeza fighting in Japanese. I had never seen Japanese DBZ, and it blew my mind. Freeza sounded bad ass, but I didn't care for Goku's little girl voice, but the music and uncut hits/blood kicked real ass!

[jpdbzrulz4sure]

DBGT raw on the International Channel back in 2003-ish.

[GotenDaisuki]

For me, the moment I started watching, I chose the Japanese version. Being a late addition to the fandom, I had the Blue Bricks, which were my first real DB purchases. This choice was also made because I generally prefer to watch anime in Japanese, so that preference sort of "saved me" from a dedication to the English dub.

[Pafupafu]

Fansubs in the late 90's early 2000's. Goku's voice was always a hard thing for an American to swallow. The music however, EPIC.

[csl002]

2012

I got tired of the racist/stereotypical/unfunny accents in the Dragonball dub, first time watching it. So I switched over.

[samuraix123]

I'll try not to make this long When I was kid my mother used to take me in downtown area but I remember there was a guy that sold Anime on VHS. so I picked up some tapes (I can't really remember what they were) but I seen Fusion Reborn on VHS!(it was probably a bootleg) I was like so I got that home and popped that sucker in and the quality was absolutely horrible and it was all Japanese no subtitles But me and my brother didn't care as far as we was concerned we hit the holy grail lol that was sometime in the late late 90s I can't remember the year.

[Pokewhiz7]

Around maybe, 2010, shortly after I joined this forum, I watched the Jump Special on YouTube which didn't (and still doesn't) have a dub. Then I watched DBZ movie 6 in Japanese, and it just goes on from there. Now I vastly prefer the Japanese version.

[Jawdrahb]

Early 2000s, downloading clips from fan sites truncated from digitised raw or subbed sources circulating at that time.

[Son_Gohan]

Before Youtube, in the early 2000s, through some video clips on a Dragonball fan-site.

The first clip I can distinctly remember watching was in DBGT, where SSj4 Goku was charging his Kamehameha against Oozaru Bebi. Naturally, the initial reaction back then was "Ehhh, why the hell does Goku sound like a girl?!".

[BluezaBladeNZ]

For me, it was around 2005/2006 when I found a copy of a DBZ Movie 13 fansub. I wasn't aware of the mistranslations back then so I assumed that the characters actually swore that much in the original. For the series I briefly watched it in 2009 on the Orange Bricks but I officially started watching everything in Japanese when I started buying the Dragon Boxes.

[DragonBoxZTheMovies]

I think it was '07, and I was watching the hell out of the Cooler's Revenge since it was the only Dragon Ball DVD I owned at the time. For whatever reason I chose to switch to the Japanese version, and I was like: "Did he just say bastard? In a children's cartoon? I have to show my friends how hard-core I am!"
Needless to say, my 10 year old mind was blown.

[Gonstead]

My first experience? This one will have a little story behind it.

Sometimes whenever me and my Dad would spend time together, he had a house he was looking after for some people. Every week, I was allowed to rent some DVD's nearby at a local video store. At the time, this was how I discovered GT for the first time.

The recent DVD at the time were the episodes of the Super Saiyan 4 Goku vs Baby fight. For some odd reason, I had discovered the Japanese version of the show and so I decided to check it out.

The only parts I can actually remember watching were Dan Dan Kokoro, the eye-catchers and Goku's Kamehameha killing Baby as he escaped and was killed.

I wasn't really wowed at the time really and I promptly forgot all about it for the next DVD's I rented of GT.

Needless to say, even though I've become smarter than I was back then, I still like GT and can't find myself to really hate it.

[DBZGTKOSDH]

When Kai started in Japan, I watched the first episodes with Raditz, but stopped because I didn't have a PC, and didn't have much influence in my opinion about the Japanese version and the English dub, apart from the fact that there was cursing in the Japanese version (I wasn't in anime back then, and I'm still not in it since I only watch Naruto apart from DB and I don't plan to watch any other, and I was surprised that an animated series had such words in it). I wasn't on forums back then, and I was spoiled by the DB Wikia back then, since I was visiting it a lot those years, so I thought that the FUNi dub & the Season Sets were... awesome. So I started my first DB marathon in 2009, and watched DBZ-DBGT-DB+Movies & Specials from the Season Sets, and then, thanks to the Wikia, I also started watching Kai, so that I could catch-up. Then I watched the Japanese version, and discovered that the FUNi dub was crap. And then, I discovered Kanzentai, and I read about the Daizenshuu & the Dragon Boxes, and then last summer, I started a new marathon, but from DBox sources, and everything in Japanese. I watched almost everything available, and I'm glad I did. Now, I only allow myself to watch the Japanese version.

[Piccolo Daimao]

I've never watched the original Japanese anime in its entirety, but the first time I saw clips of it must've been only a couple of years ago. Gokuu's voice never really bothered me, and I didn't even know it was a woman voicing him until I saw people on YouTube complaining about it. I just accepted them, the same way I accepted the dub voices. I thought the music was a bit cheesy, though.

[dbboxkaifan]

2005-06 but wasn't the complete series, only when the Dragon Boxes Z started being released I watched the series thoroughly.

It doesn't help that I was pirating the series in 2005-06 and the audio that was in them was "odd" music I never heard before (FUNi's US music) but now I'm aware of it.

[SonEric84]

I think it was the late 90's or very early 2000's, through clips on whatever old-school fansites hosted them at the time, and then the international channel when our cable provider finally picked it up.

[DBZAOTA482]

Somewhere around the mid-2000's when browsing the internet.

At first, I found it off-putting (I was introduced to the anime dubbed) for typical reasons (I.E. Goku's voice) but after certain enlightenments and watching more episodes, I grew to like it more and more. One of the first things I've noticed is that Goku is less naive and cuses more than his dub counterpart, he is like a hillbilly manchild(he uses terms like "yo" and "ain't") rather than a brain-dead Superman. Another thing I noticed is that the dialogue tends to be far more involved and less brimmed with corny jokes and chessy one-liners. Third thing I noticed is that the soundtrack is fully orchestrated opposed to the synthesized music that Faulconer composed for the English dub and it actually leaves room for silence during moments that need the suspense so the novelty doesn't wear off nearly as fast. Final thing I noticed is that the female characters sound a lot less obnoxious, for example I can't listen to Bulma's dub voice without having a slight grimance on my face and whenever dub Chichi yells, it hurts my ears. In the Japanese version, that is not the case.

[Son Satan]

I first recall seeing the series in Japanese during the days of the International Channel, probably around early 2002. I was at my cousin's house, and they had just upgraded to a fancy-schmancy iO package on their cable. Well, I wanted to watch DBZ, but it wasn't on Cartoon Network at that moment. My cousin said he knew a different channel it was on and switched it over. I thought it was pretty cool, if I remember, it was one of the Vegetto episodes. I pretty much forgot about it until I switched languages on one of the games out of boredom.

[Zestanor]

Well, since this explanation involves :1. The internet, and 2. My memory, it will be convoluted as crap. But I'll try my best. I had never cared for the series before. So I watched the first few episodes of a let's play of "Buu's Fury" and then I made my decision. It was two years ago, I was bored, and I had found something to fill the gap. I loved the let's play, but I didn't want to spoil anything, so I stopped watching it. Then I watched the entirety of Dragon Ball (153) in English, on the Net. I knew that Dragon Ball Z in English was convoluted, with odd amounts of editing, and different BGM, so I embarked on the seemingly impossible task of finding DBZ in English, with the Kikuchi score, on the internet. Then I found some people talking about the Dragon Boxes on the Funi forums and here. I decided I would purchase the Dragon Boxes for Christmas, along with some of the Dragon Ball season sets. So in between the summer that I watched DB dubbed and Christmas, I watched no more episodes. I only lurked on then-Daizex and listened to the podcast, and somewhere late November I was 'converted' by you guys. So when I got Dragon Box #1, I popped in the disc and didn't change the language.

So what really made me choose the Japanese over the English, was the Kikuchi score, since I had gotten used to it in dubbed Dragon Ball.

Edit: So the date I began watching in Japanese would be January 2011

[Gaffer Tape]

Ugh, I am embarrassed to recall this little tidbit, but I remember back in 1999, when FUNimation announced they were releasing Sleeping Princess in Devil's Castle uncut... well, actually, to go a bit further off-topic, this was when I was ordering tapes of the original 13 episodes of Dragon Ball from their website, and my packages would often come with announcements from FUNimation. I still vividly remember receiving the yellow piece of paper with a photocopied, black and white image of Freeza, proudly proclaiming that the next 50 episodes!!! would soon be coming, obviously referring to season 3. And I, being just educated enough and just stupid enough to be dangerous, remember excitedly sending an e-mail to FUNimation saying, "Wow, that will get us to, like, the Cell Games, won't it?!"

Anyway, where was I? Oh, yeah. I got another flyer like that about Sleeping Princess being uncensored. And I remember being afraid that that meant it wouldn't be in English at all, and that I'd have no idea what was going on, so I actually did shoot them an e-mail asking if it would be in English, adding the stipulation that "I wouldn't want to buy it if it was in Japanese." And having to type that statement makes me want to go back in time and bitch slap my 13 year-old self for making my 26 year-old self look bad on an Internet forum!

Little did I know that I had actually heard the Japanese score earlier that year when Toonami aired DBZ movies 2 and 3. I didn't know about the replaced score at the time. I just assumed that was higher budget movie music, and that's why it sounded so much more awesome than what I heard on the TV show.

Eventually, the Internet and sites like DaizenshuuEX, DBZ Uncensored, and Planet Namek (as well as the sad story of what continues to happen to the Star Wars Trilogy) instilled in me my philosophy of watching media in its original version. I do recall seeing a short, grainy RealPlayer clip of the Goku vs. Majin Vegeta fight, and I think that might have been my first actual exposure to the Japanese anime. At least, that's the first I can remember. And it's funny because I really don't care for that fight at all. What stuck out to me, of course, was the brief snippet of voices: how bizarrely deep Vegeta's voice was, and how bizarrely high-pitched Goku's was.

Finally, by 2000, having found out all that had been done with the English dub, I went to my local Suncoast, picked up the Pioneer VHS of DBZ Movie 3, and I never looked back... much to the annoyance of my friends, who always responded to my love of the original version with some variation on, "We're Americans, so we watch the American version."