Rocket Japanese Reviews

Course #1's audio lessons were really excellent. The timing of the dialogue/repeat sections is spot on, the native speakers have very clear accents, and you learn a lot quite quickly. It is easy to put them on in the background and make several additional passes through the material to cement the teachings. I found the accompanying grammar lessons to be difficult to retain in the 'mostly text' format, and they often don't follow along with where you are in the audio lessons at all.

Course #2 is somewhat the opposite. The native speakers (and host) all have distinct accents, the dialogue timing is a mess, and the content is all over the place. One minute you're basically redo-ing a lesson from Course #1, and the next you're totally lost when everything switches to 'casual' speech, which you've had almost no exposure to thus far. Alternately, the grammar courses are now structured to expound upon specific parts of the audio, which is an improvement.

I was VERY happy with Course #1 overall, but I am soured on the audio portion of Course #2. When the dialogue-repeat sections sometimes go word-by-word, but give you 10 seconds to speak, it becomes very difficult to learn the line in entirety.

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I have found Rocket Japanese to be useful, and frustrating in about equal measures. The voice-recognition is a great idea in helping perfect your pronunciation. Unfortunately I find that about 20% of the time (I haven't kept a count, this is a rough estimate) it simply doesn't work. Either your phrase is not recognised, or deemed incorrect. As a beginner, not knowing if it is you, or the software that is the problem can be insanely frustrating. It doesn't appear to be the longer sentences that suffer from this. The very first sounds we are asked to repeat are riddled with examples. After 3 months it still tells me I can't pronounce 'ka'.
I have finally been prompted to write this because the system tells me I cannot pronounce 'America jin' correctly. Clearly this is an almost native sound to an English speaker, but I mimic the example exactly to no avail. I can forgive these issues, although there are other minor complaints. I have also reported some mistakes in the text, but they remain unchanged. Personally I find that the audio lessons are rather childish, and would be happier if we just got on with the lesson, but I recognise that might just be me being grumpy.

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I definitely loved it even I just try it for a while. However, the price is so HIGH and EXPENSIVE for a student like me.

Very disappointed in this product. Trial was very good. Purchased Step #1 with coupon. Have not received access nor response to my many emails. Feel like I was suckered. Again Free Trial very good. Enticing once paid nothing. Again maybe a glitch. No response from Customer Service opens the door for negative assumptions

My feelings with this course are quite mixed. On one hand, there is a lot of material and you pick up useful phrases from the very start. On the other hand there are several issues which in the long run are quite frustrating especially in the testing part

1) Apart from the Quiz section, everything else is clearly automatically generated from the material. This means you can have the same word repeated 2 or 3 times. In the "Know it" part there are cases where you cannot know what to say because two words have the same english translation (tourist).
2) Speech recognition is frustrating. It stops listening while you are talking, sometimes it doesn't want to recognize what you say no matter what (I even tried playing back the native audio from my phone near to the computer microphone, and it didn't even recognize the native speaker!) and sometimes it says 100% even if you mess up a few syllabes.

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the audio recognition needs work. Also stop asking me to review every six times i record a word.

Enjoy learning it, Very good because you can always return to difficult parts. Had to stop for a while because of moving my home, but it was easy to pick up. From now on, I'll regularly continue. The target is learning the language. Unfortunately, my computer does not allow voice recording. I hope that this does not influence the study results.

Rocket Japanese: it's been two (April 14.) months since the Rocket Language app for iOS has been updated and since I am not able to use it anymore as it is not possible to write in hiragana/katakana anymore. I contacted support, got (after days - and weeks) assurance that it will be taken care of - yet the "bug" update 2 weeks ago did not address any of my clearly communicated (screenshots and screenvideo) problems. If you work on iOS (iPhoneX & iPad Pro, latest firmware) do not download this app - it is NOT working as advertised.
A word to the support... promising an update and therefore a working app might "quiet" the user but it is contraproductive to take no action at all.
I'll be happy to re-review my feedback once I am able to use the app again. Until then... 1 star.

My opinion may change over time, as I will complete this series (I paid for it.) But right now, I am not sure I like this method, generally speaking. I prefer methodical, professional books such as Genki/Adventures in Japanese/etc which actually explain what is going on. For example: Japanese conjugation is a little tricky and this course (so far) is not helping. I also have a tutor in Tokyo, and nothing is better than that. Lastly, the Kanji exercises at the end are super frustrating as when the sentences are long, the stupid thing auto-places the words and I cannot get them in the right order even when I know it. That said, it's always good to listen to native speakers, but in today's world, there are no shortages of resources in that department.

Rocket languages supply "Translation method" for learning 2nd Languages . It's the same as in the school. There worse has no photos to understand by view , no stroke order .
Too many lessons for beginners .