NoaLingua Documentation
What downloads, how big it is, and how the queue behaves
Packs download by themselves as soon as the extension knows which language you are learning, one at a time and smallest first. Expect 15 to 30 minutes before everything is local. Sizes vary enormously: the English dictionary pack is 475 MB, French is 54 MB.
What downloads
| Pack | Size | What it gives |
|---|---|---|
| Offline word dictionary (FreeDict / WikDict) | small | Single-word translation, offline and instant. This is what answers a hover. |
| Grammar data (UniMorph) | 1–50 MB | Conjugation and declension tables. Absent for Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai and Finnish. |
| Definitions and IPA (Wiktionary / kaikki) | 16–475 MB | The largest and most useful. English 475 MB, Chinese 145, German 91, French 54. Absent for Serbian and Croatian. |
| Example sentences (Tatoeba) | ~8 MB | The whole corpus for your pair, searched locally. |
| Punctuation model | 56 MB | Restores full stops in captions that have none. One model for 47 languages, so it downloads once per profile. |
| Chrome translation model | varies | Chrome’s own on-device translator. Chrome downloads it, not NoaLingua. |
| Chrome speech pack | varies | Chrome’s speech recognition model, shared with the rest of the browser. |
How the queue behaves
One at a time, smallest first. Five simultaneous downloads on one connection throttle each other and the biggest then looks stuck.
Retries run automatically at 30 seconds, 2 minutes, 10 minutes, 30 minutes and 2 hours — five attempts before anything is asked of you. An alarm wakes the worker every five minutes while something is missing, and stops when everything is there.
A fresh browser start clears the failure count: different network, woken machine, a full new schedule.
One pack failing is not all packs failing. Each has its own guard.
A manual click waits for neither the queue nor the backoff — you pressed the button, so you have already decided.
Reading the corner indicator
The top-right indicator appears only while something is genuinely downloading or stuck. It says which language and what percentage, which pack failed with a retry button, or briefly that everything is done.
When everything is fine it says nothing at all. That is deliberate: an indicator that is always present is one nobody reads when it matters.
Getting everything local
- Choose your two languages in the extension popup or Settings → Languages.
- Leave the browser open. Downloading continues in the background and closing a tab does not stop it.
- Check the corner of the screen after 15 to 30 minutes.
- When the corner goes quiet, everything is on disk and lookups no longer touch the network.