Migaku Chinese Review (2026): Is It Worth It?

Migaku is the best tool we know for turning Chinese shows and YouTube videos into flashcards, and it's worth paying for if you already know a fair amount of Mandarin and watch it on a computer most weeks. Click a word in the subtitles and you get its meaning, pinyin and tone colours; one more click makes a card with the sentence, the audio clip and a screenshot. It's a poor fit for complete beginners, phone-only learners and anyone who wants a course to follow: the full toolkit runs in Chrome on a desktop, and the phone app plays only YouTube. On Migaku's website, Standard costs $10 a month or $96 a year, buying in the app costs more ($14 a month on the US App Store), and there's a 10-day money-back guarantee rather than a free trial (prices checked 9 November 2026). A word on bias: we make Mandarin Mosaic, a sentence-mining app, so Migaku is our closest rival in method.

Migaku isn't ours and we earn nothing from it. Prices and features here are from Migaku's own pricing page, its Chinese page and FAQ, its Chrome Web Store listing and its App Store and Google Play listings, all checked on 9 November 2026. Older write-ups describe Migaku as an Anki add-on sold through Patreon; that's how it started, not how it works now.

Migaku at a Glance

How Migaku Works for Chinese

Migaku began as a set of Anki add-ons and a browser extension. Today it's a platform of its own: the Chrome extension does the looking up and card making on your computer, and the cards go into Migaku's own flashcard app (Migaku Memory), which you review on your phone or at study.migaku.com. Anki has become an optional export. The workflow, as Migaku describes it on its Chinese page, has four steps:

1. Parse. Open a Netflix episode or a YouTube video in Chrome and switch Migaku on. It splits the Chinese subtitles into words (Chinese doesn't put spaces between them) and makes each one clickable. On YouTube it generates subtitles if a video has none.
2. Look up. Click a word you don't know, such as 羡慕 (xiànmù, to envy), and a pop-up shows its meaning, pinyin, a native recording, pictures and an AI explanation of what it means in that line.
3. Make a card. One click turns the line into a flashcard with the word, the whole sentence, a definition, the audio clip from the show and a screenshot.
4. Review. Migaku's spaced repetition brings the card back just before you'd forget it, on your phone or in the browser, offline if you like.

A few things are specific to Chinese and done well:

• Tone colours. Subtitles, pop-ups and cards can colour each syllable by tone: red for the first tone, yellow for the second, green for the third, blue for the fourth and grey for the neutral tone.
• Pinyin. Pinyin can be shown above the characters, word by word.
• Simplified or Traditional. A setting converts subtitles and web pages from one to the other, and the dictionaries cover both, so it works for Taiwanese shows as well as mainland ones. The beginner courses are Simplified only.
• Playback modes for hard dialogue. You can show subtitles only on lines that contain a word you don't know, or have the video pause before each line so you can read it first, then hide the text and listen. A sidebar lists every subtitle line so you can jump back to one.
• A comprehension score. Migaku tracks every word you know and tells you roughly how much of a video or page you'll understand, which helps you find shows at your level.

On a phone, it does less. The iPhone and Android apps play YouTube with clickable subtitles, read text you paste or share into them, read text from photos (a book page, a menu, a screenshot) and run your reviews and courses. Netflix, Disney+ and the other streaming sites work only through the Chrome extension on a computer. Migaku says the extension "has been specifically designed to work with Google Chrome".

For beginners, every plan includes two Mandarin courses: Fundamentals, which teaches pinyin and pronunciation in about a month, and Academy, which teaches about 1,500 words and 330 grammar patterns, enough by Migaku's estimate to recognise about 80% of the words in Chinese TV and films, in about six months at 10 cards a day. Its courses add one new item per card and every sentence has a native-speaker recording. A characters course for Mandarin is listed as "coming soon".

How Much Migaku Costs

Migaku has no free plan. All three plans unlock the same tools and every language Migaku teaches, so one subscription covers Mandarin and Cantonese together. Early Access gets new features a few months before Standard, and Lifetime is Early Access paid once.

Prices checked 9 November 2026. The website prices are in US dollars, and they showed in dollars when we checked from the UK. The Lifetime sale ("42% off") was running on the pricing page that day; Migaku's Chinese page gives the normal price as $499. Apple's lists name the plans but not their lengths, so the monthly and yearly rows in those two columns are our reading of the prices, and the several Lifetime prices are probably sale and full prices side by side. Migaku's FAQ says its prices "will periodically increase", so check the pricing page before you pay.

Trial or refund? Migaku's pricing and sign-up pages offer a 10-day money-back guarantee: you pay, and you get a full refund if you email [email protected] within 10 days. The Chrome Web Store and Google Play descriptions still mention a free 10-day trial with no card, but Migaku's own site doesn't, so expect to pay up front. You cancel a website subscription under Subscription in your account settings and keep access until the end of the period.

Is it worth the money? At $96 a year it's in the same range as other paid Chinese apps, and cheaper than most if you'd use it for several languages. Buy on the website rather than in the app: a year of Standard costs $96 there and $136.99 through Apple. The real question is whether you'll mine from shows several times a week. If you will, it saves hours of card making. If you won't, a free setup does most of the job (see Migaku vs Anki below).

Strengths and Weaknesses

What it does well

• The fastest route from a subtitle line to a card. No copying, pasting or recording clips: the sentence, its audio and a screenshot arrive in one click. That's the job it was built for.
• Made for watching. Playback modes, the subtitle sidebar and keyboard shortcuts make a 40-minute drama episode workable as study.
• Handles Chinese properly. Word splitting, pinyin, tone colours and Simplified-to-Traditional conversion are all built in.
• Cards with context. Each card keeps the line's audio and a screenshot of the scene, which gives you more to remember a word by than a plain card does.
• One subscription, every language. Useful if you're learning Cantonese too, or another language alongside Mandarin.
• Not a trap. You can export your cards to Anki if you leave.

Where it falls short

• Desktop-first. The heart of Migaku, mining from Netflix and other streaming sites, needs Chrome on a computer. If you watch on a TV or a phone, you'll use only a fraction of what you pay for.
• Setup and choices. An extension, an account, dictionaries, card settings and playback modes: it rewards people who like to tune their tools, and it puts off people who want to open an app and start.
• Not where beginners should start. Real dramas are fast and full of names and idioms, so a beginner meets several unknown words in almost every line. Migaku itself says you need its 1,500-word course first, which takes about six months, and its characters course for Mandarin isn't out yet. A course app does that stage better.
• You do the choosing. Migaku's advice is to make cards from sentences with only one unknown word. In real dialogue those take watching to find, and it's easy to save too many cards, or the wrong ones.
• The cost against free tools. There's no free tier, the app prices are about 40% higher than the website's, and Anki plus a free subtitle extension does much of the same job for nothing.
• No speaking or exam practice. Migaku says it isn't built for pronunciation practice or HSK preparation; it's for understanding what you hear and read.

How Migaku Compares

Migaku is one of several ways to do sentence mining, learning words from whole sentences rather than word lists. Our round-up of sentence-mining apps for Chinese sets it beside LingQ, Pleco, Readlang and others. The two comparisons people ask about most are below.

Migaku vs Anki

Anki is free on computers and Android (AnkiMobile for iPhone is a one-off £24.99), and it's the flashcard app most Chinese learners have tried. Both use spaced repetition. The difference is where the cards come from:

• Anki: you download shared decks or make cards yourself. Getting a sentence, its audio and a screenshot from a Netflix scene into Anki takes extra add-ons, or a lot of copying.
• Migaku: card making is the point. One click from a subtitle line gives you a better card than most people make by hand, and its app tracks which words you know.

Pick Anki if you're happy with shared decks, you make few cards, or you won't pay. A free extension such as Language Reactor gives you dual subtitles and pinyin on Netflix (see our guide to Netflix with Chinese subtitles), and our Anki for Chinese guide covers the setup. Pick Migaku if you'll mine from shows every week and the time saved is worth about $8 a month to you. You can start with Migaku and export your cards to Anki later, or import your Anki decks into Migaku.

Migaku vs Mandarin Mosaic

This is our app, so weigh this paragraph accordingly. Both apps rest on the same idea, learning a new word inside a sentence where it's the only unknown one. The difference is who finds the sentence:

• Migaku lets you find it yourself in the shows and videos you watch, on a computer. The sentences are as varied and as hard as real Chinese.
• Mandarin Mosaic picks it for you from a library of sentences at your HSK level, each checked by a native speaker, with audio and spaced repetition, on the phone. It doesn't play video or mine from Netflix, though you can add your own sentences and import Anki decks. It has no desktop or web version and no speaking practice. There's a limited free plan, and at the time of writing Premium is about £12 a month, less on the yearly plan, with the first month free.

If you watch Chinese on a computer most evenings, Migaku fits that habit. If you study in short sessions on your phone and don't want to hunt for sentences, Mandarin Mosaic fits better. Our Mandarin Mosaic review lists its limits.

Who Should Use Migaku, and What to Use Instead

Use Migaku if you know a few thousand words, you already watch Chinese dramas or YouTube channels on a computer, and you want to keep the words you meet there. That's the learner it was built for, and for them it's worth the yearly price. Our guide to learning Chinese from TV shows has shows to start with.

Use something else if:

• You're a complete beginner. Start with a course app such as HelloChinese (see our HelloChinese review) and come back to Migaku when shows stop being a wall of sound.
• You study on your phone. Migaku's phone app has YouTube but not Netflix. A sentence app or a graded reader on the phone will get more use.
• You won't pay. Anki plus Language Reactor covers dual subtitles, look-ups and review for free, with more manual work.
• You want to speak. Migaku doesn't train speaking; you'll need a tutor or a speaking app alongside it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Migaku Good for Chinese?

Yes, for intermediate learners who watch Chinese on a computer: it splits Chinese subtitles into clickable words, shows pinyin and tone colours, handles Simplified and Traditional characters, and makes a sentence card with audio in one click. For complete beginners it's less suited, because its own Mandarin course takes about six months before real shows become usable.

Is Migaku Free?

No: there's no free plan, and Migaku's website offers a 10-day money-back guarantee rather than a free trial. Standard costs $10 a month or $96 a year on the website at the time of writing (9 November 2026), and more if you buy it in the app.

Does Migaku Work on a Phone?

Partly: the iPhone and Android apps play YouTube with clickable subtitles, read pasted text and photos, and run your flashcard reviews and courses. Netflix and the other streaming sites work only through the Chrome extension on a computer.

Is Migaku Better Than Anki for Chinese?

For mining sentences from shows, yes, because it makes a card with the line's audio and a screenshot in one click, which takes add-ons or a lot of copying in Anki. For reviewing shared decks or cards you make yourself, Anki does the job for free, and Migaku can export your cards to it.

Does Migaku Support Traditional Chinese?

Yes: its tools read both Simplified and Traditional characters, a setting converts subtitles and web pages between them, and its dictionaries cover both. Its beginner courses for Mandarin are in Simplified characters only.

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