--- title: "A language pack download is stuck · NoaLingua" description: "Packs download one at a time, smallest first, so a large one waits its turn. A genuine stall now fails rather than hanging, and retries on a fixed schedule." url: "https://noalingua.com/answers/language-pack-download-stuck/" language: "en" modified: "2026-09-09" license: "CC BY 4.0 — https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" --- 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](https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ocimolffhgpeeoifjpjhgikgfbnmlkdh) Opens the Chrome Web Store listing **NoaLingua — beyond dual subs: video, web, PDF** — free, no account, Chrome 138 or newer. 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. Get NoaLingua — free, and every feature included Dual subtitles on YouTube and Netflix, clickable words on any page and in any PDF, shadowing and spaced review — 28 languages, no account, and your deck stays on your own machine. [Add to Chrome — Free Add to Chrome](https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ocimolffhgpeeoifjpjhgikgfbnmlkdh) Opens the Chrome Web Store listing **NoaLingua — beyond dual subs: video, web, PDF** — free, no account, Chrome 138 or newer. - **Free** — every feature, not a trial - **No account** — nothing to sign up for - **Two dropdowns** — that is the whole setup ## 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 [Packs and downloads Every pack, its size, and what it gives you.](https://noalingua.com/docs/downloads-and-packs/)[On-device and offline What works with no network once the packs are there.](https://noalingua.com/features/offline-and-privacy/)[Supported languages Which packs exist for which language.](https://noalingua.com/supported-languages/) ### Related NoaLingua answers - [Is there a Chrome extension with an offline dictionary?](https://noalingua.com/answers/offline-dictionary-chrome-extension/) - [Why were only some lines translated?](https://noalingua.com/answers/translation-daily-limit-reached/) - [Why did the extension stop working after an update?](https://noalingua.com/answers/extension-stopped-working-after-update/) ## 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](https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ocimolffhgpeeoifjpjhgikgfbnmlkdh) 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.](https://noalingua.com/pricing/) - [No account, no email Nothing to sign up for and nothing to cancel. There is no login screen at all.](https://noalingua.com/privacy/) - [Two dropdowns to set up Pick what you are learning and what you want translations in. That is the whole setup.](https://noalingua.com/getting-started/) - [Your words stay yours Export to Anki, CSV, a spreadsheet or a full JSON profile — free on every plan.](https://noalingua.com/docs/export-import/) [What happens after you install](https://noalingua.com/getting-started/) · [Pricing](https://noalingua.com/pricing/) · [What it cannot do](https://noalingua.com/limits/)