Questions people actually ask

It shows two subtitle languages at once on YouTube and Netflix, makes every word clickable for the meaning it carries in that specific sentence, and returns the words you save on a spaced-repetition schedule. The same word card works on any web page and inside PDFs, and everything lands in one deck.

No. There is no registration and no sign-in at any point. Your cards, settings, downloaded dictionaries and review schedule live in your Chrome profile, and you move them between computers by exporting one JSON file.

Every feature is free on every supported site. Paid plans remove a cap on how many words your deck holds, and nothing else. Note that the cap is not yet enforced in the current build, which the pricing page says plainly.

Chrome and Chromium-based browsers at version 138 or newer, which is the first release with the on-device translation API it depends on. There is no Firefox or Safari build and no mobile app.

You can use it immediately. Full offline operation takes 15 to 30 minutes while the dictionary and grammar packs download in the background. The corner of the screen reports progress, and stays silent when there is nothing to report.

Yes, for dual subtitles, clickable words, saving, replay and shadowing. Netflix never exposes the full subtitle file, so unlike YouTube there is no whole-film transcript, no bilingual PDF export and no translating ahead of where you are.

Only where a site has a video element with a readable caption track. A generic adapter checks for that on every page. Most sites do not qualify, and on those the extension does nothing rather than half-working.

Only if you explicitly turn on Chrome’s on-device speech recognition, and it says plainly that the result is a machine guess — particularly on names — with no timings to jump to. By default it reads subtitles that already exist and does not invent them.

YouTube’s own auto-translate is almost certainly switched on, so the captions arriving are already translated. Reloading will not help — YouTube remembers that choice for about 30 days. Open the player’s subtitle menu and pick a plain language.

No. Subtitle text is translated on your device by default. Sentence text only leaves your machine if you switch translation to Cloud, and a single word only leaves it if you keep the grammar lookup option on. Your watch history, your cards and your progress are never sent anywhere.

One thing: checking whether a paid licence is still valid, once a day per device. That endpoint stores a licence key, a status and a plan name — no email, no name, no customer id. It is the only part of the product that contacts a server we operate, and we would rather say so than have you find it in a network tab.

Never. Say It Back keeps the score and the specific words that did not pass, as numbers and text. If you enable online speech recognition, the audio goes to Chrome’s own speech service for recognition and nothing is stored by NoaLingua.

An extension page runs on its own origin, so fetching an ordinary PDF URL is a cross-origin request and almost no document server permits it. That permission is requested only when you press a PDF button, never at install, and is used only to read the document you just asked for.

The card captures the sentence, its translation, the source title and the exact timestamp immediately, without waiting for any lookup to finish. Definitions, grammar tables and examples fill in behind you — with retries, when packs finish downloading, and again at review time.

No. There is nothing to set up. Practice games use a fixed ladder — 1, 3, 7, 14, 30, 90 then 180 days — and a wrong answer drops two rungs rather than resetting to zero. The manual review screen additionally lets you grade yourself.

Yes, and export is free on every plan. You can produce Anki-compatible CSV, a full Anki package with video frames and the speaker’s real audio where it was captured, an editable spreadsheet, or your whole profile as JSON.

The deck is per language. French and German are effectively two separate accounts, so check which language is selected in the Learn header or in Settings under Languages.

Refresh the page. When the extension updates, the script in every already-open tab is orphaned — the box still looks alive but every action fails. NoaLingua detects this and offers a reload button. This single cause explains most support emails.

Usually another subtitle extension is intercepting or replacing them. Turn it off and refresh. If the box appears but stays empty, it will print the reason rather than staying silent.

Downloads run one at a time, smallest first, so the biggest one shows no progress while it waits its turn — which looks identical to being stuck. The real status is in Settings under Downloads.