Rocket Languages Reviews

The course content is great, the design, layout and structure of the course is great. A lot of content, gets you to a good level of language ability if you study it correctly. The price is very high when you consider all of the free resources available though. I use the high price as a motivation to study, so that I'm not wasting my money, but it must dissuade so many others.

On the plus side:
• I like the way grammatical rules are discussed in understandable, laymans’ terms
• It’s easy to learn/revise words and phrases
• It’s easy to develop your listening skills to understand what people are saying and its easy to develop skills in identifying what to say

But there is room for improvement:
• Speech recognition needs improvement
o Gives some poor pronunciation 100%, but doesn’t recognise closer attempts
o When sentences are long it often cuts you off
o Often (every session) crashes for no reason and you have to log in again
• Its easy to put all your effort into reading and writing – rather than developing listening and speaking skills

I find there is generally too much preamble getting into each dialogue - too much from the English guy especially. Ironically, he seems to be talking as though adressing an ESOl class . However, as a native speaker, I find his delivery and Uk accent quite amateurish. E.g he says "wiv" instead of " with" etc. just irritating. Also, I am disappointed that he is used in dialogues when his Mandarin accent is not spot-on. Just model the genuine accent by using a Chinese speaker for each dialogue. Also, in the 2nd Premium pack, the upgrade, I wouldn't have bothered buying it had I known it involved a module devoted to planning a wedding - relevant to about 5% at best of your the average audience.

Im still looking for the vocabulary lists ?
It doesnt help to teach someone how to say and memorize 'hello how are you' in Korean,
if they cannot find out which one is how, or you .......
Not happy with the lack of definitions......

I just went through the introduction, the only problem I had would be there's no spelling in the conversation. If I would be listening to this program without pre-study the contents, it's hard to remember the sentence afterwards.

I think the overall teaching style of this program is pretty great, but the execution is not there yet.

The major shortcoming is the male's pronunciation. I am a complete beginner to studying Chinese, but it's incredibly obvious his pronunciation is absolutely awful. During the conversations, I can understand the female perfectly fine, but I still can't understand the male speaker well even after studying the lesson. I also worry that I may pick up bad habits myself even listening to his speech.

Another minor drawback is that I do not believe there is a way to zoom in or make the characters larger on the mobile app, which is unfortunate since I tend to study these lessons while exercising on an elliptical or other cardio machine, so the phone is a fair distance away from my eyes.

A feature I wish they would add in the future is increased robustness of the conversations. Instead of teaching us exactly one perfectly scripted conversation, teach us variations. Most of the time there are a handful of different ways someone could say the same thing, so even if the conversation is relatively simple in content, learning just one specific tightly scripted conversation is going to be pretty useless once you step out into the real world.

Overall, Rocket Chinese is founded on good ideas and has solid potential, I hope it will strive to improve and live up to the potential I see.

I tried the interactive lesson on planning an activity for the weekend. I was disappointed as I thought it would be interactive enough to the extent that if would allow me to repeat the phrase/sentence/word after the spanish speaker and have him correct my pronunciations. It does give me time to repeat after him but without the correction of pronunciation, it left me wanting.

Definitely helpful to hear native Koreans speaking and the forms of testing made sure that i remember what i learned in the lesson. I would recommend this site to anyone who wants to practice their pronunciation. The site is very organized and easy to navigate. The tools are very useful. All in all, this is a good site.

The voice recognition works pretty well. It struggles with very short sounds, but overall very good. I've used other programs that ask you to speak the answers, but the pronunciation analysis makes me try much harder to say each response out loud.

The romaji is good for beginners, but already know hiragana and katakana, so the romaji is very distracting. I wish there was an option to turn off romaji so I can practice reading.

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Well, I would be happier if I could do it for free longer because I'm only 15 and I dont have any money to pay for it, but it has been extremely helpful in the lessons I can do. I can now say greetings (basic ones), and know that Atatakai is hot in japanese, which is good to know because if I go to Japan, I would like to know how to get a good, hot cup of coffee. So, overall, great for people who can actually pay for it, not for those who can't.