How to listen to Japanese podcasts, radio and X Spaces with English subtitles (free)
Published: 2026-09-16
Japanese podcasts, radio-style shows and X Spaces are some of the best places to hear natural, unscripted Japanese. They are also the hardest to follow, and the usual tools are no help at all.
Subtitle translation extensions work by translating captions that a video already has. Audio has no captions, and a podcast is not even a video. Some shows publish transcripts, but few do, and not in English.
This guide shows how to get English subtitles on any Japanese audio playing in your browser, for free, without installing anything.
What you need
- Chrome or Microsoft Edge on a computer. Safari and Firefox do not work
- Not a phone or tablet. Mobile browsers cannot share tab audio
- The audio playing in a browser tab. A web player, not a phone app
- A one-time download of the speech recognition model. For Japanese, the Balanced setting is about 590MB; after the first time, it is loaded from your browser's storage
No account, no extension, no payment, and no time limit.
What works and what does not
| What you want to listen to | Works? | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Podcasts in a web player | Yes | The web versions of Spotify, Apple Podcasts and similar services |
| X Spaces | Yes | Open X in the browser and join the Space there |
| Internet radio and audio streams | Yes | Anything that plays in a tab |
| Talks and interviews on YouTube | Yes | Even with no captions |
| Phone apps | No | It needs a browser on a computer |
The dividing line is simple: can it play in a browser tab on a computer? If a show is only in an app, look for a web version.
How it works
LiveSub is a website. You share one browser tab's audio with it. It recognises the Japanese speech on your own computer, translates it with Chrome's built-in on-device translator, and shows the Japanese and the English as subtitles. Nothing is uploaded, and because nothing runs on a server, there is no time limit and no list of supported sites.
Step by step
1. Set the direction and try the sample
Open https://livesubweb.com/?lang=en in Chrome. Under "Translate from / to", choose Japanese → English. This matters: Japanese uses a different recognition model, and if you leave it on English → Japanese you get garbled text instead of subtitles.
Press "Try a sample". It plays a short built-in Japanese clip and shows subtitles without sharing any tab. It also gets the one-time download out of the way.
2. Choose a recognition setting
Under "Recognition setting", pick according to what you are listening to:
- A live Space or radio stream: Balanced. It keeps up with continuous speech
- A recorded podcast, if your computer has a powerful GPU: Japanese-tuned. It is a model retrained on Japanese only, and it mishears far less in fast, casual conversation, which is exactly what podcasts are. It is much heavier, and the first download is about 730MB, but with a recording you can pause, so speed matters less. It only appears when your browser can use the GPU
If you are unsure, stay on Balanced. You can switch at any time, even while subtitles are running.
3. Share the tab
Open the podcast, Space or radio stream in another tab. Back in LiveSub, press "Start (share a tab)". In Chrome's sharing dialog:
- Pick the "Chrome Tab" section at the top
- Choose the tab playing the audio
- Tick "Also share tab audio" at the bottom left
- Press Share
4. Play and read
Press play. Subtitles appear about one to two seconds after the words are spoken. If no sound arrives for about 12 seconds, LiveSub tells you; check the audio is playing and not muted, and if you shared the wrong tab, press "Share again".
Making the most of audio-only content
Read while you do something else. Press "Show in a floating window". The subtitles move into a small window that stays on top, so you can listen while working in another window and glance at the text when you need it. You can scroll back to catch a line you missed.
Save the transcript. Podcast episodes often run over an hour. "Download transcript" saves the Japanese and the English with timestamps as a text file, so when you later wonder where a topic came up, you can search the text instead of scrubbing through the audio.
Put the hosts' names in the word list. Conversation shows repeat the same names constantly: hosts, guests, regular segments, companies. Recognition gets these wrong in a different way each time. Open "Word list" and add the correct spellings, one per line. Japanese entries need at least 3 characters, English ones 4.
Use it as study material. Set the display to "Original and translation" to see the Japanese and the English side by side, or "Original only" to listen without the English and switch over only when you need to check. Podcasts are natural-speed conversation, which makes them demanding but realistic practice.
Pause and replay. With a recording, the subtitles follow the audio. Pause, and they pause; rewind, and the line is subtitled again.
Honest limits
- About one to two seconds of delay behind the audio
- Two hosts talking over each other is the hard case. Lively conversation shows lose accuracy in the overlapping parts
- It is machine translation. You get the gist; jokes and nuance often do not come through
- Names are the weak point. The word list helps, but it is not perfect
- Music and jingles reduce accuracy while they play
- Computer only. It needs Chrome or Edge on a desktop or laptop, and a show that plays in a browser
It will not be a perfect transcript. But it turns "I cannot follow this" into "I know what they are talking about", and for a show you had given up on, that is often enough.
Related guides
- For using the same setup to practise listening, see Japanese listening practice with the original and an English translation
- For live video streams, see how to translate a Japanese livestream in real time
Try it
Open the show in a browser tab, then open LiveSub on your computer: