NoaLingua Answer
When a language pack download stalls
What retries by itself, what does not, and the button that skips the queue
Most likely it is waiting rather than stuck: packs download one at a time, smallest first, so the largest one sits at zero until the others finish. A genuine stall — no bytes for two minutes — is now marked as failed and retried automatically on a fixed schedule rather than hanging at 99%.
Short answer Downloads run one at a time, smallest first. A real stall fails and retries; the manual button skips the queue.
Step by step
Doing it with NoaLingua
- 1
Check Settings → Downloads for the real status
The corner indicator is a summary. The Downloads section is the truth: what is already there and how many words it has, what is missing, and how many megabytes remain.
- 2
Press Try again in the corner if something has stalled
That button clears the entire backoff schedule and immediately retries everything missing, at once. A manual click never waits for the queue or the backoff — somebody who pressed the button has already decided.
- 3
Or just leave it running
Retries are automatic on a fixed schedule — 30 seconds, 2 minutes, 10, 30, then 2 hours — five attempts before anything is asked of you, with an alarm waking the worker every five minutes while anything is still missing.
- 4
Give it fifteen to thirty minutes after choosing a language
Downloading starts by itself as soon as the extension knows what you are learning, and again whenever you change it. When the corner goes quiet, everything is there.
Add to Chrome — Free Add to Chrome Opens the Chrome Web Store listing NoaLingua — beyond dual subs: video, web, PDF — free, no account, Chrome 138 or newer.
The detail behind the NoaLingua answer
Why one at a time, and why the big one looks stopped
Five simultaneous imports on one thread throttle each other, and the largest then looks as if it has stopped entirely. Serialising them, smallest first, means each one finishes at a visible rate — at the cost of the biggest pack appearing to do nothing until its turn arrives.
The extra grammar pack is the big one: roughly 54 MB for French, 145 MB for Chinese, 475 MB for English. It is also the most useful, because it carries definitions, IPA and register labels that the smaller morphology pack does not have.
What changed so a stall stops looking like progress
The queue used to have a watchdog that would skip a stalled download without touching the item itself. The item then sat at 99% forever with no error, and every screen watching it read that as "still going".
Now, two minutes without a byte marks the item failed, gives it a readable sentence, and puts it into the retry schedule. If the file does arrive late anyway, success beats the watchdog. And a browser restart clears the failure count, because a different network or a woken machine deserves a fresh schedule.
What survives the background worker being killed
The worker is not a server and Chrome can stop it at any moment. While a download is running it is kept awake; if it dies anyway — the machine sleeps, Chrome restarts — the state is on disk and the download resumes.
One pack failing is also not the others failing. Each has its own guard, where previously a single error would silently skip everything below it in the queue.
More questions people ask NoaLingua
Which packs are there, and do I need all of them?
An offline word dictionary, morphology for conjugation tables, the large extra grammar pack, a Tatoeba example-sentence corpus, and a punctuation model shared across languages. Everything works without them; they make lookups instant and offline rather than networked.
Does the punctuation model download per language?
No — one model covers 47 languages, so it downloads once per profile rather than once per language. It is fetched last, because it only helps on videos whose automatic captions have no punctuation.
Can I download a language before I start learning it?
Yes. Settings → Downloads lists your language first and then every other supported one, precisely so a pack can be fetched in advance.
Where this is documented on NoaLingua
Related NoaLingua answers
Try it on the next thing you were going to watch anyway.
Free, with every feature. No account, nothing to cancel, and your deck stays on your machine.
Add to Chrome — Free Add to Chrome Opens the Chrome Web Store listing NoaLingua — beyond dual subs: video, web, PDF — free, no account, Chrome 138 or newer.- Free, and not a trial Every feature on the free plan — both PDF modes, shadowing, all 30 practice formats.
- No account, no email Nothing to sign up for and nothing to cancel. There is no login screen at all.
- Two dropdowns to set up Pick what you are learning and what you want translations in. That is the whole setup.
- Your words stay yours Export to Anki, CSV, a spreadsheet or a full JSON profile — free on every plan.