The 2014 Edition is here!

Bonjour tout le monde !

We are pleased to announce the release of the 2014 Edition of all our Rocket Languages courses. A lot of thanks goes to the hard working Rocket team, as well as quite a few members who contributed to the cause.

The major changes are;

My Dashboard
A new more user-friendly Dashboard; this style of Dashboard will work a lot better on a range of devices and screen sizes. Also, it gives you an "at a glance" overview of your progress through the course.

You'll see that each Lesson icon on the Dashboard has smaller icons within it, typically one or more of H, W, K, and Q. These relate to the "Testing" part of each lesson.

Testing
Both the Interactive Audio, and Language & Culture lessons have a "Testing" tab that replaces the old "My Level".

When you've successfully rated the lesson using one of;

Hear it Say it! (H)
Write it! (W)
Know it! (K)
or the Quiz (Q)

The respective letter icon on the Dashboard will update along with the corresponding icon at the top right of the actual lesson.

Write it!
Now, Write it! is a new learning tool that we have added in response to members' suggestions about how to improve their writing of another language. Make sure you check it out it's pretty cool!

Quiz
Nearly every lesson has a multi-choice quiz. Until now the results of this quiz were not included in the lesson rating. That has now changed and quiz results are now pulled through to the Dashboard!

Lesson layout
Also, the lessons themselves are laid out in a more user-friendly way. For example, the Interactive Audio Course lessons now have the audio for the conversation and extra vocabulary all on the same page.

My Vocab
My Vocab is the tool that lets you double click on a word or phrase and then store it for future reference. We have upgraded this so that when it pops up it also gives you results from Phrase Finder so you can see the word/phrase in different contexts if it is used elsewhere in the course.

Apps and mobile devices
We are currently working on upgrading how Rocket courses work on the apps and with the multitude of devices that are available today. Please be patient with this!

AN IMPORTANT NOTE!
Because we have added new algorithms into determining how the Dashboard works some users may have an odd looking Dashboard until Quizzes or Write it! tests are completed.

Is there anything else?

Well, yes! There are quite a few cosmetic changes that have been made. These are too numerous to list here!

Also, we are working on a couple of other things that should be out before the end of the year, which will also greatly enhance the learning process!

Amicalement

Hi all - Thanks for the feedback!

Write it! does have a couple of issues that we are sorting through. Certainly figuring out what to do about fullstops and exclamation marks is one of them. We will be changing things behind the scenes once we get a handle on the usage patterns.

Make sure you check out My Vocab to see how we have integrated it with Phrase Finder (just double click on any word/phrase and then click the "abc" icon that appears. Very useful for finding that word/phrase in other contexts.

Hi Jeremy - The chat functionality needed a rethink from the ground up. As you rightly mention there were far too many things wrong with the beta version.

The release will be posted on social media and the blog later today!

Hi Jeremy - We ended up taking out the Proficiency tests as they have been superseded by the Testing tab that is now in each lesson. Also, the usage rates for the Proficiency tests were really low, only around 3% of people used them.

Hi Grahame - The Proficiency tests were just pulled from the Quizzes, so we believe the new Testing tab provides better all round learning. We do have at least one other thing in mind for the Testing tab before the end of the year. Watch this space!

And, I agree, the new My Vocab / Phrase Finder layout works really well! Thanks for the feedback!

Hi Dan/Shan - We are working on a better keyboard than the one that is currently available for Spanish. We hope to have this sorted by the end of next week. Sorry about any inconvenience!

Hi all - Thanks for the comments and feedback. We are hoping to iron out a few of the bugs this week, although on the whole they seem relatively minor.

Luigi - Try a few hard refreshes (ctrl + F5), if this doesn't work then the best bet is to email support with your system details.

Hi all - The tests not resetting is a known bug, it will be rectified this week. As will the issue with My Vocab not saving correctly. Sorry for any inconvenience. 

The PDFs have been taken out as the print screen function should now print the lessons in the same way that the PDFs were presented.

There has been a caching issue with the new style sheet that we have used, which is causing the Dashboard and same ratings not to be updated. The way to rectify this is to hard refresh a few times (ctrl + F5). If there is still an issue then please email support so we can look into it further.

Hi Stuart - Yes, this is an issue we are looking at as soon as we can!

Hi Garry - The My Vocab icon is now working!

Hi Ozan - The progress Rocket has been removed and replaced by the new Dashboard layout. Over the next week we will add in the ability to manually rate a Test. In saying that Write it! acts as another reinforcement of the vocabulary. It really forces you to listen from my experience!

Hi David - Yes, there are a few issues with the umlauts that we are trying to work through!

Hi Karen - Glad you like it. I have found Write it! good for testing my pronunciation of accented letters, as well as my actual writing. It makes one more aware of the subtleties in my opinion!

Hi SisterLuna - There is a check box at the bottom left of the keyboard. When that is checked you can select the accent you want and then the letters that fit with that accent are highlighted. Select the letter you want the accent applied to and it should auto-magically appear!

Hi Eric - I am glad you like it!

Hi Grahame - Do you mean the Language and Culture sections? Can you email a screenshot along with the lesson number/s to support @ rocketlanguages.com?