Japanese listening practice with original and English side by side (free)
Published: 2026-09-16
If you are learning Japanese, listening is often the slowest skill to build. Native-speed speech goes past before you can parse it, and if there are no subtitles, there is no way to check what you actually heard.
This guide shows a way to practise with any Japanese audio playing in your browser: you see the Japanese as it is spoken, with an English translation next to it, and you can save the whole thing afterwards. It is free, and there is nothing to install.
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
- 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.
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 both as subtitles. Your audio is never uploaded anywhere.
Because it works from the sound, it does not matter whether the video has subtitles. That opens up material that has no captions at all.
Material that works well
- Recorded talks, lectures and presentations
- Interviews and conversation podcasts, played in a web player
- News and commentary videos
- Vlogs and travel videos
- Videos made for Japanese learners
One clear speaker at a time is the best case. Loud music, or several people talking at once, makes recognition worse. Recorded material is easier to practise with than live streams, because you can pause and rewind.
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 will get garbled text instead of subtitles.
Then press "Try a sample". It plays a short built-in Japanese clip and shows subtitles without sharing any tab, so you can check that everything works on your computer. The first time, it waits for the model to load.
2. Choose a recognition setting
Under "Recognition setting", Balanced is the recommended starting point for Japanese.
If your computer has a powerful GPU, try Japanese-tuned. It is a model retrained on Japanese only, and it mishears far less, even in fast, casual speech. For study, where you rely on the text being right, that accuracy is worth having. It is much heavier, though, and the first download is about 730MB. It only appears when your browser can use the GPU. You can switch settings at any time, even while subtitles are running.
3. Share the tab
Open your material 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
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 that the video is playing and not muted, and if you shared the wrong tab, press "Share again".
How to use it for listening practice
Listen first, check second
If the English is on screen from the start, you tend to read it instead of listening. Set the display to "Original only". You hear the Japanese and see the Japanese text, with no English to lean on.
When a sentence gets away from you, switch to "Original and translation" and check the meaning. The display switches while subtitles are running, so you do not need to restart anything. A simple routine: play a section with "Original only", try to follow it, pause, switch to "Original and translation", and compare what you understood with what was said.
Rewind and replay
The subtitles come from whatever audio is playing right now. If you pause, they pause. If you rewind and play a line again, that line is subtitled again. Replaying one sentence three times is a normal way to use this.
Save the transcript
"Download transcript" saves the Japanese and the English with timestamps as a text file. You can read it back afterwards, pull out words you did not know, or search it later for a sentence you remember hearing.
Put names and terms in the word list
Names of people and places, and specialist terms, are what recognition gets wrong most. Open "Word list" and add the correct spellings, one per line. Japanese entries need at least 3 characters, English ones 4. Anything recognition mishears is corrected to your spelling, and it also fixes the hiragana and katakana mix-ups that recognition is prone to. If a lecture repeats a term, adding it first makes the text much easier to read.
Keep the video large
Press "Show in a floating window". The subtitles move into a small window that stays on top, so you can make the video large and still read them.
Honest limits
LiveSub is a subtitle tool, not a language-learning app. Before you rely on it:
- The Japanese text is a machine transcription. It mishears words, and sometimes drops or adds them. Treat it as a hint for checking what you heard, not as a reference transcript
- It is machine translation. You get the gist; nuance is often lost, and when the transcription is wrong, the translation is wrong with it
- About one to two seconds of delay behind the audio
- Music and overlapping voices reduce accuracy
- Only the audio is used. Text on screen is not translated
- Computer only. It needs Chrome or Edge on a desktop or laptop
Related guides
- For recorded videos in general, see how to get English subtitles on Japanese videos that have no captions
- For audio-only material, see listening to Japanese podcasts, radio and X Spaces with English subtitles
Try it
Open the Japanese audio you want to practise with, then open LiveSub on your computer: