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One of the easiest ways to learn a language is to make language learning part of something that you already do. Let’s talk about the best Chrome extensions that you can use to learn a language.

Language Reactor

The first Chrome extension to learn a language that I want to talk about is Language Reactor, formerly known as Language Learning with Netflix and Language Learning with YouTube.

Basically Language Reactor is a free chrome extension that you can use to turn any video that you find on Netflix or YouTube into a study tool. If you already really like to watch movies on Netflix and videos on YouTube from people, and for people who speak your target language natively, Language Reactor is easy peasy.

Trancy

Similar to Language Reactor, the next Chrome extension to learn a language that I want to talk about is Trancy. Now Trancy does a lot of stuff that Language Reactor does by giving you the subtitles and helping you to translate between languages, between your target language and the native language. But it also uses artificial intelligence to really bump up your studying a little bit.

So if, for example, you really value having a lot of activities about a video you’re watching or a book you’re reading, then Trancy is excellent because it basically takes the transcripts, the subtitles of the show or movie that you’re watching, and it creates a bunch of different activities like Fill in the Blanks, speech recognition, all sorts of stuff.

CaptionPop

Next on my list of best Chrome extensions to learn a language is CaptionPop. CaptionPop does a lot of the same things that Language Reactor and Trancy do. But the thing that I really love about CaptionPop is the Chrome extension.

Put the CaptionPop Chrome extension into your browser, and when you go through YouTube, it’ll show you what subtitles are available for every video. And it’ll not only tell you the subtitles are available, but it’ll also tell you which languages the subtitles are available in.

Unfortunately for us, this was a lot more useful back a few years ago when YouTube was really big into getting people to translate subtitles onto different YouTube videos. Since they’ve killed that option, it’s a little bit less useful.

But to keep YouTube accessible to people who are hard of hearing and really like captions like me, CaptionPop can still be really useful because again, if you’re looking at YouTube for vlogs in Italian, you can find videos where it says like, there are subtitles in Italian for this video and it gives you that extra step ahead in your language learning.

Obviously, this is a few fewer steps than Trancy and Language Reactor do. But if you don’t need those steps and you just need that little bit of, you know, help with your search on YouTube, then CaptainPop is a really solid option.

Readlang

The next best Chrome extension to learn a language that I’d like to recommend to you is Readlang. Now, we’ve talked a lot about video so far in this video. Now let’s switch over to texts and reading and writing and vocabulary and things like that.

Readlang is a very, very simple free tool that you can use to take any text from anywhere on the Internet, and make flashcards out of it, practice reading it, pick up the words that are new to you and need to work on more. All that kind of stuff.

Not only can you use it to translate the texts that you found, but you can also access all of the other texts that other users have imported into Readlang, and use that as practice for your target language. It’s kind of similar to LingQ if you’re familiar with LingQ, but it’s a lot more simple and less icky. It’s not pretty by any means, but it’s functional.

Toucan

Next on the list of Best Chrome extension to learn language is Toucan. And Toucan was just recently bought out by Babbel, so it must be good.

Toucan makes it really simple to casually immerse yourself in language while you’re reading English or whatever language, depends on what languages Toucan covers, but you get my drift.

But if you find yourself reading on the internet a lot and could use a little bit of injection of language learning as you go, Toucan is excellent because it will literally just translate words into your target language randomly. This can be a fun, interesting, pretty passive way of picking up new vocabulary if it’s a method that works for you.

Masterlingo

If you like the idea of Toucan, but you don’t like the randomness of it, the next Chrome extension to learn a language is Masterlingo. Of course, Masterlingo is a little bit less passive in that it doesn’t translate words from your native language as you’re reading your native language.

But if you’re already reading your target language and use Masterlingo, all you do is click on a word and it’ll help you translate and learn the word as you go. So yes, it’s similar to Readlang and LingQ, but it’s prettier and simpler than LingQ.

VocabBoost

On the topic of vocab, the next Chrome extension to learn a language is one called VocabBoost. VocabBoost basically turns any text into a cloze text. And if you don’t know what a cloze is, it’s basically a fill-in-the-blank sentence.

You have a sentence, you have a little square, and you have to put in the right word or conjugation or whatever it is into the square. This is the entire premise of another resource called Clozemaster, but it’s not its own resource.

It’s a this is a Chrome extension and you can make any text into this cloze. So if you like Clozemaster, but you want flexibility or you’re not quite at an intermediate level yet, VocabBoost might be a great alternative for you.

YouGlish

This isn’t a Chrome extension but is actually really vital and relevant here and that is a resource and a website called YouGlish. Honestly, I’ve had YouGlish on my list of resources for a long time but have never mentioned it for whatever reason.

Now, YouGlish is awesome and relevant in this video because it’s basically a search engine for YouTube videos that have specific phrases in different languages. So you can practice your listening comprehension and learn to understand different phrases from a bunch of different mouths, accents, situations, tones of voice, and all that kind of stuff.

If you are at all familiar with learning to understand a language, then you know that it’s easy enough to understand one audio clip, but it’s really hard to contextualize that information across all sorts of different voices and accents and men, women, young or old, all sorts of stuff.

YouGlish is a free website that you can use to pick the language that you’re learning, plug in a phrase or a word like “me llamo”, for example, and it’ll give you literally hundreds of video clips of people saying “me llamo”, and you can just train your ear to understand “me llamo”, from all these different accents, scenarios, etc.

If you like these suggestions, but you’re really not sure what to do with them or which ones to choose, I really recommend you take my free course on how to choose a language app. It’s a free short three-day video course. It’ll basically take you step by step to choose a language app based on what you like, what your goals are, what your language is, and all that jazz.

At the very least, it’ll teach you how to use my free language app search so you can stop searching for language learning resources and start actually learning languages.