Rocket Korean Reviews

Following the verbiage on the conversation pieces is great When repeating the words given in vocabulary, the words are spoken way too fast and it is hard to understand or to keep up with it. My recommendation would be to speak those words slower so the non-native speaker can follow easily regardless of age or where are you from. Also, the flashcards need sound for it.

I've enjoyed learning Spanish with Rocket Languages, but delving into Korean proved to be unexpected challenging. Any Korean teaching material that starts from the beginner level should include lessons on Hangul, but that's lacking in Rocket Language Korean. Fine, I taught myself Hangul using other sources. Not being familiar with Asian languages in general, Korean was much harder for me to pronounce and speak quickly. The speaking exercises are way too demanding in terms of accuracy of pronunciation and the speed at which you have to respond and often my responses get truncated halfway because I'm trying to remember the exact wording. From the very first introductory lesson, there are a lot of more complicated phrases and vocab that get thrown in which are tested, and almost impossible for a beginner to get right. It's been a frustrating experience all around. I guess I'll stick to Romance languages, and use other materials to learn Korean.

As a completely new person to Korean, this course is not what I should have chosen to begin with. To be able to feel like you "completed" the lesson, you have to write things in a language they have not taught you yet! The lessons are too long and having to learn the "extras" to feel like you completed the material they were focusing on is also frustrating. I have no incentive to move through the material, because I feel like I can't even perfect the first few lessons!
The voice detection sometimes is very poor, which means saying the same thing fifty times at lightning speed to get credit for it. I like other programs for learning Korean better than this one. I might come back to it after I have a better foundation.

Overall, I understand the structure of the course, but it seems like many aspects, especially in testing, are done by a cookie-cutter algorithm which makes some really critical mistakes.

First, some technical issues. I use Chrome, as recommended, and there are a few things missing. Most notably, the on-screen Korean keyboard is not there. Also, I often do not have the button to mark a Writing lesson as completed. Finally, unlike in the app, there is no way for me to cut a voice recording off if I wish to restart, which often means waiting quite a while for the program to try to sort through gibberish.

Now, for the "cookie-cutter" aspect that bothers me. Frequently in the Audio lessons, the native speakers will say something that was not part of the lesson. This is fine, except that these phrases get put in the testing sections. For example, in the very first lesson there are introductions of the two native speakers. One says that he served in the Korean Marine Corps, then was discharged and migrated to the United States with his parents. He says this in Korean. This is a great way to get acquainted with the sound of the language. However, then this phrase comes up in the testing section of the exam.

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I would like to learn Korean on my different devices, Mac, iPad and MS Surface, but I have no clue, how the program remembers how far I had already advanced on one device, when I continue with another. There is apparently no way to log in with my ID and Password, so that the program knows who I am. This feature probably exist, but it is difficult to find out where and how.

Note from Rocket Languages: Hi Jac, thanks for your feedback. Someone of our customer support team has reached out to you to solve this issue. All the best with your Korean learning! Your Rocket Languages Team

It is such a shame. Rocket has the potential to be really good, but lack of attention to detail and poor explanations mean that it fails to reach its potential.

I have almost finished my Rocket Korean course. I have benefited from it, but only because I have a Korean wife, who has been able to explain things that Rocket have left vague, not explained well or just got plain wrong. First, the good things. The reinforcement process (Flashcards, oral repetition and so on) is excellent and has helped things to stick in my mind. The voice recognition software is also pretty good. It is weak on short words of one or two syllables, but in general works well. The audio conversations and reinforcement within them are also decent. There are three big problems with Rocket, however. Firstly, it’s explanations of grammar are not very clear and sometimes contain errors. Secondly it illustrates concepts with sentences that are far too complex and contain sections which are not explained. This is incredibly frustrating, because it means that you end up rote learning a lot of phrases rather than learning how to construct your own sentences. Finally the reference material and structure is very weak.

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I hate to write this, but the English guide's strange midcentury Boston brahmin accent is so distracting that I cannot hear the Korean being spoken. Aside from the strange English, the phrases used for study are very long and not broken up into memorizable parts, and there is no option to not include the very long and unnecessary "extra vocab" from the audio in the flashcards and other study.
Overall this seems to be teaching canned phrases to be stored in short-term memory, rather than starting out small and forming a true understanding of the language for long-term learning. This might be good if you're visiting Korea for a short period and need to parrot some emergency phrases, but I may have to look elsewhere to actually learn to understand Korean. Pretty disappointed in how much money I spent.

Honest review

The voice recognition could use some work, but it's fun to use and definitely gets you speaking out loud. I haven't really seen any features offered yet that's worth the price. I'm basing that off of what's offered for free on the internet already.

Another feature though that deserves praise is the 'Play as' feature where you take the role of someone in a conversation. It's honestly a 5 star feature on its own.

Thinking about this in depth is making me realize how much is actually offered and how much I'm paying for it... I could only think of a couple good things (and they're basically the same thing). I can't recommend this to a friend while I'm thinking about discontinuing use of it myself. Wow

Rocket language is so cool , it is real helpful, i just cant say how greatful i am for your assistance, now i can pronounce alot of korean words without a problem hopefull i wil be with you for a very long time it so amazing and understandible

The web site is complicated and not very user friendly. I've spent 5 min trying to figure out how do I start the lessons and where to begin the studying. It's stupid to spend so much effort on a web site to have people leave confused. Too complicated to begin with.