Needless Repetition

exacto63

exacto63

Dear Rocket Spanish Team:

I'm slugging my way through Module 8.1 "A Feast of Spanish" and am seriously disappointed with the painful, needless repetition in this largely vocabulary list lesson. This has been an issue for me in many lessons to date, but really came to a head here. There are 97 exercises in each of the Flashcards, Hear It! Say It!, Write It!, and Know It! sections. That is too many already, but worse is that far too many of the exercises are the same words over and over and over and over again. Get it? 

I recognize that repetition is an important part of language learning, but for fairly straight-forward, easy to grasp words like milk and sugar, for example, I don't need to have separate entries for milk, sugar, milk and sugar, a tea with milk and sugar, a coffee with milk and sugar, and additional variants with please on the end. Also, remember that every time you add an exercise to a lesson, it is repeated FOUR times - and in this case it was four times a large number of exercises on simple words that we already learned early in lesson 1.

Please be more thoughtful when selecting these exercises, to eliminate the unwelcome busy work and waste of our time slugging through multiple exercises on things we almost certainly already know. Please. Really. This blows.

I know your entire team works hard and takes your product seriously, and I am impressed that you continue to improve and upgrade the courses. I hope you will think of that and streamline the number of exercises in each lesson to make them more effective and a better use of participants time.

I've included below a similar comment from 11 months ago on your French course, to help underscore my point that the needless repetition is a real buzz kill. Thanks for your help. Cheers. Mark

I'm working through lesson 6.4, and it strikes me as a bit surprising that phrases like "à bientôt", "à la prochaine fois" and "très bien" keep turning up in the Rocket Reinforcement activities in lesson after lesson. I recognise that repetition is important, but I wonder whether certain phrases (such as these ones) really need quite so much of it in the later stages of the course? I feel like they lengthen the lists unnecessarily - especially the "Write it" lists - and make it more of a chore to get through them all. It would be really good if some of the more frequent repetitions could be pared back a little, so one can concentrate on really getting to know the longer phrases and the newer vocabulary.  
TravisB13

TravisB13

I agree to some extent.
However, I decided that the Survival material was a different type of exercise.  I saw it as a long hike in the desert.  I had to suck it up and plow.  I tried to race through it, make it a game of stamina.  Also, I did not do it all in one day!  I do bits and pieces of the Survival material at a time, for the very reasons you mention.
Likewise, I sometimes alternate with the LanguageCulture sections:  do them numerically or go back and forth.
I have decided that I am in charge of my own progression.  I am glad that I have options.
There was a  jump from Level 1 to Level 2 in the amount and difficultly of the material.
I now must complete 10-20 for each Activity, rather than completing all of HearIt/SayIt, then moving on to WriteIt.  Writing/Typing allows me to listen many times [talk about feeling demoralized! but then when I finally get it, that is an accomplishment! ]
So, even though there is a buzz-kill aspect, you are right, maybe flip it and harness that tenacity when you'll be faced with a 13 word HearItSayIt ¡Ay, carumba!
Anyway, let's keep providing feedback.
Liss-Rocket-Languages-Tutor

Liss-Rocket-Languages-Tutor

¡Hola exacto63 y TravisB13!

Thank you very much for your feedback!

I have passed the issue of duplicated vocabulary on to the Spanish team and they will include looking into this as part of their current review of the Spanish courses. Our apologies for the frustration this has caused!

Saludos,

Liss

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