Rocket French Reviews

I thought all the lessons would be audio such that you could listen in your car or with headphones while working out or walking but some require you to read and hear. I think even alphabet, numbers and grammar can all be made in an audio version. Also, I do not like the fact that you can’t stop and review an audio lesson. At least on an iPhone you can’t just stop a lesson and go back to the beginning. You have to let it play out until the end to start over.

I like the lessons and the reinforcement activities as I really feel that I will recall the various words and phrases in my longer term memory. The emphasise on pronunciation is good but even at an easy setting sometimes the words don't register correctly - however it is good on improving my speech.
There are a few annoyances - the lesson is 20 minutes, not sure why we need the opening and closing music. Paul does seem to speak English with a strange accent which is distracting. Given the price of the course I would assume that this is aimed at adults so we don't need the forced cheerfulness and "jokes" that are included. I would rather the lesson had more actual learning content and less slang words.
I purchased the course as it has grammar lessons - these are OK but I generally have a lot of questions on minor points which are not covered - a reference as to whether these will be covered later in the course would be useful.
I would also like to know how the 3 levels equate to external standards. For the UK for instance if you do the 3 levels is this equivalent to a GCSE qualification or would it be more A level standard as I would like to take my French further.

Read More

The microphone speaking part of the browser is terrible. I have 3 headsets (all expensive) and also used the microphone on the laptop. For simple words like Nom, Bonjour (I am getting zero or sorry I didnt catch that). I know I am not fluent yet, but i've got those words down, but the software occasionally wont get what i say. Very annoying...

Rocket languages is fun and its nice to learn French through Rocket Languages....It has advanced type of learning and audios.....It has all sorts of french words , i found this website helpful... Merci...Thankyou..

So far RL is okay. The audios are entertaining, but a tad slow and I wished that they were a bit less English-heavy as it really breaks my French-thinking mindset. Any technical issues (and there are quite a few given the nature of the voice recognition software) that are reported fall onto deaf ears. Overall, it's an okay program, but needs heavy supplementation from grammar and vocab books (as all learners should have anyway).

The system itself is very powerful and comprehensive. It would be really enjoyable.. if it worked.
The voice recognition software, which is the heart of the system, won't work most of the times.
At first I put it down to my bad pronunciation as I am using top-notch technology. As my pronunciation skills got better I could see no improvements. At this point I tried feeding the audio from the Rocket French app itself to my laptop through microphone. Incredibly enough IT WOULDN'T PICK IT UP or would show accuracy at 50-75%!
This is frustrating, because I am eager to learn but I lost my initial enthusiasm. Sometimes I get stuck to the same word for minutes with no 100% pronunciation accuracy.
For 263 euros I was expecting better software development.
Very disappointed.

Some days it is good, other days voice and speech recognition is plain atrocious and frustrating. Whole phrases 'not heard', words (or numbers) plucked out of nowhere that bear no resemblance to what was said. And this on a high speed internet connection. That wouldn't be half as frustrating come each time with a useless pop-up on what to do. Will I keep using it - yes. Can it be useful - yes. Does its voice recognition engine need to be improved - YES.

Works okay, very helpful context, but the part where you speak the words and they judge your pronunciation is super super broken for me, rendering the whole app half-useless. It either can not hear what I'm saying at all, or is way way off base about what I said. I've tried switching devices, switching to an external mic, etc etc but the problem seems to be ROCKETBOOK. So far Duolingo has proven to be better, and much more affordable. I hope they fix the voice part...

A good learning tool.
I'm not happy with the audio it's not working 100%. On average each lesson has 5% faulty audio.
I have complained but the advice is not working, because the fault is in the app it's selves.
The only thing I can do is ignore the gaps and hope.....

It has almos all th languages and it teaches it in a good way