Best Language Learning Extensions for Chrome (2026)

Search for the best language learning extension and you get a stack of "best of" lists. Open any of them and you find the same thing: the list was written by one of the tools on it, and that tool is number one.

That would be tolerable if the facts held up. They mostly don't. We re-checked every price on this page on 20 August 2026, directly on each product's own site, and found that the numbers circulating in those roundups are wrong for half the category — sometimes by a factor of two.

Disclosure: we make Linglass, and it's first on this list. You should discount that accordingly. So here is the rule we used, before the list, and the places where we lose are marked as clearly as the places where we win.

Try Linglass free — no card, no time limit →

How we ranked, and how we priced

The ranking criterion is one question: how much of the learning loop still works when you stop paying?

The loop is: understand a line → look up a word → keep the word → meet it again later. Almost every tool here does the first two steps for free. The difference is what survives after that, because a vocabulary you can't keep is a vocabulary you don't learn.

The pricing rule is list prices only. Annual billing counts as a plan — every tool has one, and it's a real choice you can make today. Limited-time promotions and "founder" discounts do not count, because they price the tool for the month you happened to read about it, not the year you'll use it.

That rule costs us. Trancy at its promotional rate is a third of our annual price; Sublo is cheaper than us either way. Linglass is not the cheapest tool on this page, and by monthly list price it's the second most expensive. We think the free tier is worth more than the gap, but that's the trade being made, not a detail to bury.

Quick comparison

All figures verified 20 August 2026. Prices are list prices in the currency each site displayed to us.

Several of these price by region, so what your own account is quoted may differ from the figures here — Language Reactor in particular bills in local currency and also sells a Bitcoin option at "from $7/month" with no auto-renewal. Open the pricing page yourself before you commit to anything.

1. Linglass — the free tier that includes the whole loop

Why it's first: it is the only tool here where you can build a vocabulary and review it indefinitely without paying. Free means dual subtitles on YouTube, Netflix, iQIYI and Viki; 15 contextual translations a day; pronunciation and phonetic transcription on every word you click; and unlimited saved words with unlimited flashcard review on FSRS, the spaced repetition algorithm Anki itself adopted in 2025.

That last item is the whole argument. Trancy caps free saving at 100 words. Language Reactor lets you save only inside one feature. Sublo has no vocabulary feature at all. Sabi and Migaku have no free tier to cap. If you never pay us, you still end up with a deck you built from things you actually watched — screenshot, audio clip and the sentence from the scene attached to each card.

The translation is contextual rather than dictionary-first: click "kind" in a line and you get the meaning that fits that line, not a list of six senses to choose between. Interface in 22 languages, 10 languages you can learn.

Where we lose, plainly: we cover four video platforms — YouTube, Netflix, iQIYI and Viki. Sublo claims twelve and Trancy seven, so if your show is on Disney+, Prime Video or Apple TV+ we are simply not an option, and no amount of the rest makes up for that. We're not the cheapest on this page by either billing cycle. And there's no built-in grammar course and no speaking coach — Migaku and Trancy have those and we don't.

Best for: learners who want the study loop, not just a second subtitle line, and who don't want the loop to expire.

2. Trancy — the broadest platform coverage

Dual subtitles on YouTube, Netflix, HBO, Disney+, TED, Coursera and Udemy, with your choice of translation engine and a genuinely wide free tier: unlimited word and sentence lookups, subtitle downloads, and web page translation cost nothing.

Watch the tier structure — it changed. Trancy now sells two paid plans, not one: Premium at $42.00/year list, and Premium + Advanced AI at $105.60/year list, which adds the frontier models and a 20-million-token monthly pool. Roundups written a few months ago describe a single $42 tier and miss the second one entirely.

What to watch: free saving stops at 100 words and 50 sentences, which arrives faster than it sounds. AI transcription is capped at 40 videos a day on Premium. And Trancy's most persistent Netflix complaint is that it substitutes its own generated subtitles even where good native tracks exist.

Best for: learners whose material is scattered across streaming and course platforms.

3. Language Reactor — the original, still the default

The tool that created this category in 2019, back when it was called Language Learning with Netflix, and still the one with two million users. Netflix and YouTube dual subtitles, a large curated catalogue, transliteration for non-Latin scripts, and an AI chat companion called Aria that was added since most of the roundups you'll find were written.

What's free: Netflix's own subtitle tracks, the basic AI dictionary, and Aria without memory. What Pro gates: speech recognition and machine translation on Netflix, saving words anywhere outside PhrasePump, Anki export, cross-feature highlighting, the better AI model, and Aria remembering your previous conversations.

What to watch: no mobile app at all, and the roadmap has been quiet for years. Reviewers still report recurring subtitle-fetch failures.

Best for: Netflix-first learners who want the largest catalogue and don't need mobile.

4. Migaku — the deep option, now at half the price it's quoted at

Built for the immersion crowd, with the best flashcard workflow in the category: Anki-depth templates, three auto-pause modes, media-rich cards, and unusually strong Japanese, Korean and Chinese support — furigana, kanji breakdowns, JLPT and HSK levels.

The price everyone quotes is out of date. Migaku is widely listed at $19.99/month, including in our own older comparison, which we've now corrected. Today its site shows Standard at $10/month, Early Access at $15/month, 20% off annual billing, and a $499 lifetime plan.

What to watch: still no free tier — a 14-day money-back guarantee is the trial. The product is split across a browser extension, a web app and mobile apps, and new users reliably struggle to work out which one does what. European languages feel thin next to Japanese, Korean and Chinese.

Best for: serious JA/KO/ZH learners who already know how they want to study and will pay for depth.

5. Sabi — the widest streaming support, if you'll pay from day one

Disney+, Netflix, Prime Video, YouTube and Rakuten Viki, with dual subtitles and in-video exercises, across 29 languages.

No free tier — a 7-day trial with no card required, then €7.99/month or €4.99/month billed annually at list. You will see much lower numbers quoted, including on Sabi's own comparison page, which lists Sabi at €1.84 and its competitors at their standard prices. That €1.84 is a 63% "founder's discount", and pricing one tool at a promo rate beside rivals at list is exactly the distortion this page's pricing rule exists to avoid.

Best for: people who want one extension covering Disney+ and Prime alongside Netflix and will decide inside a week.

6. Sublo — the cheapest way to get a second line on screen

Twelve platforms claimed — Netflix, Max, Disney+, Prime Video, Crunchyroll, Apple TV+, YouTube, Peacock, Paramount+, Hulu, MUBI and Plex — 30+ languages in any pairing, and no account required at all.

Be clear about what it is. Sublo displays two subtitle tracks. It does not save words, has no vocabulary book and no review system. That's a legitimate product, and if a second line is all you want it's the cheapest one here: free for 20 minutes a day, €3.89/month or €2.89/month annually. It is not a way to learn vocabulary, and it doesn't claim to be. (Its own blog quotes €5/month; the site says otherwise.)

Best for: watching in the original with a safety net, on platforms nobody else supports.

7. InterSub — course platforms and Anki

Dual subtitles across YouTube, Netflix, Prime Video, Crunchyroll, TED, Coursera, Udemy and LinkedIn Learning, with a vocabulary book that syncs to Anki, plus practice bots and apps.

Free gives you 15 lookups a month and dual subtitles without live AI translation. Beyond that it's unusual in selling credits rather than only subscriptions — packs of 200, 500 or 1000 lookups from $1.50 — with Premium from $6/month. If you study on Coursera or LinkedIn Learning more than you watch drama, this is the one built for you.

What about extensions for reading web pages?

Language learning extension also covers a second family — tools that work on ordinary web pages rather than video: Immersive Translate, Toucan, Readlang, eJOY. They solve a different problem (reading), and we haven't re-verified their pricing to the standard used above, so we're not going to put numbers on them. Linglass does translate clicked words on any page, but reading tools are not what it's built around; if reading is your main input, start there rather than here.

What changed since those roundups were written

This is the part worth keeping, whichever tool you pick:

• Migaku: $19.99 → $10/month. Still quoted at the old price nearly everywhere, us included until today.
• Trancy: one paid tier → two. The $105.60/year Advanced AI plan doesn't appear in lists written earlier this year.
• Language Reactor gained Aria, an AI chat companion, and part of the Pro line is now whether Aria remembers your previous conversations.
• Sabi at "€1.84" is a founder's discount, not its price.
• Sublo at "€5" comes from Sublo's own blog; its pricing page says €3.89 monthly.

None of that is scandalous. Prices move, and a comparison page is stale the moment it's published — which is the real reason to check the date on any list like this one, including this one. Ours says 20 August 2026.

Honest limits of this page

We sell one of these tools, so treat our section as advertising and the table as the checkable part — every figure is on a page you can open yourself in under a minute. We ranked on free-tier completeness because it's the criterion we win; ranked on platform coverage the winner is Sublo, on flashcard depth it's Migaku, and on price it isn't us. And we didn't verify InterSub's or the reading tools' claims as thoroughly as the rest, which is why they carry fewer numbers.

Frequently asked questions

Which language learning extension is free?

Linglass, Trancy, Sublo, Language Reactor and InterSub all have permanent free tiers; Migaku and Sabi don't, offering a money-back guarantee and a 7-day trial respectively. The tiers differ enormously in what they allow: Sublo gives 20 minutes a day of subtitles with no vocabulary features, Trancy caps saved words at 100, Language Reactor allows saving only inside PhrasePump, and Linglass allows unlimited saved words and flashcard review with a cap on daily translations instead.

Do these extensions work on Netflix and YouTube both?

All seven support both. They diverge beyond that: Sublo claims twelve platforms, InterSub and Trancy add course sites like Coursera and Udemy, Sabi adds Disney+ and Prime Video, and Language Reactor, Migaku and Linglass stay closer to YouTube and Netflix.

Which one has a mobile app?

Linglass, Trancy and Migaku have iOS and Android apps, and InterSub offers training apps and bots. Language Reactor, Sabi and Sublo are desktop browser only.

Is a dual subtitle extension enough to learn a language?

On its own it makes input comprehensible, which is the hard part, but comprehension alone fades — you meet a word, understand the scene, and lose the word by the next episode. What closes the gap is keeping the words and meeting them again on a schedule, which is why the free-tier question above is really a question about whether you'll still have your vocabulary in three months.

Why should I trust a comparison written by one of the tools in it?

Partly you shouldn't, which is why the prices here are list prices with a verification date and a link to each source, rather than a score out of ten. Every roundup in this category is written by a vendor. The difference worth looking for isn't neutrality, which doesn't exist here, but whether the page tells you where its own product loses.

Quick recap

• Want the study loop to survive without paying — Linglass.
• Want the most platforms — Sublo for display, Trancy if you also want the vocabulary features.
• Want the deepest flashcards and JA/KO/ZH support — Migaku, now $10 rather than $19.99.
• Want the largest curated catalogue on Netflix — Language Reactor.
• Study on Coursera or LinkedIn Learning — InterSub.
• Watch on Disney+ and Prime and will decide in a week — Sabi.

Check the date on any comparison you read, this one included, and open one pricing page yourself before you pay for anything.