Rocket Languages Reviews

Seeing all the rave reviews makes me wonder if there's something wrong with me. I am not a linguistic novice; I am a native speaker of English but a fluent speaker of Korean, I majored in linguistics in graduate school, and I've studied several languages both in university classes and on my own. But I'm having a hard time making any progress in Rocket Chinese. Eleven- or twelve-morpheme sentences are just too long for a beginner in the language. And while Lin Ping's spoken examples are very clear and easy to understand, David always sounds like his mouth is full of food and everything runs together. (I'm sure his Chinese is very good, but Chinese itself tends to sound like that to start with. It's just really frustrating.)

I bought the complete premium course and am wondering if I made a terrible decision.

Overall, Rocket Languages is, without a doubt, well worth the price. The value for your money is the best. There really is not a better foreign language program out there. I have tried others as they do not match the quality of Rocket's.

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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UMMMMM FIRST OF ALL IT WON'T LET ME DO OTHER LESSONS BECAUSE I'M JUST DOING THE FREE PART - IT ADVERTISES THAT IT'S FREE - A COMPLETE TRICK!!!! OUTRAGEOUS! IT DOESN'T TEACH YOU PROPERLY - IT TELLS YOU TO REPEAT THE STATEMENT/QUESTION AND THAT'S IT!!! NOTHING ELSE! I AM VERY UNSATISFIED WITH THE WHOLE EXPERIENCE AND WOULD RECOMMEND NOT LEARNING FRENCH FROM THIS HORRIBLE WEBSITE - I WOULD SUGGEST NOT EVEN LOOKING AT THIS WEBSITE!!! A SCAM, I TELL YOU!

The system, so far, seems good, though I dislike the way it's presented (e.g., the often "cute" wording and the constant exclamation points).
But I truly resent the constant spam from Rocket Languages that began the moment I paid, and that continue despite my making every attempt to unsubscribe.
And I hate the high-pressure sales technique and the "snake oil" methods of pushing the product. I was hard pressed to buy the program with how it was being marketed, and only the generally very favorable reviews, and the money-back guarantee, made me overlook the insulting marketing.
An email to Rocket explaining these opinions remains unanswered at writing.

I am taking the French course but I find the man talks way too much in English with annoying 'jokes'. Sorry but listening to him makes it difficult for me to continue and I loose interest. Over half the lessons are in translated English or him talking.The price for the course is good and I haven't had to use customer service to comment.

It is very frustrating that I cannot offline download the lessons in the app itself on my iPhone. It would have been better that way. I want to be able to use it in the car that way. I know you can download it through iTunes, but that is too cumbersome.

So far I find the recording of my voice/voice recognition extremely frustrating. I have used a headset, my airpods and nothing at all and it doesn't recognize what I saw half the time. Even easy words like ciao and sei. Everything else is ok so far, not totally user friendly. I will try it out longer and see how it goes. But, I strongly recommend working on the voice recognition. There are many products out there that work really well with this, such as Dragon my Nuance. Maybe use their software to recognize what people are saying.

The product is not working and is confusing. The price is okay but some parts are working fine and others are the most horrible thing that is possible is that the "Play it part" is not working and is not compatible my computer and that is causing problems with the learning experience. I would not recommend it to a friend especially with quality headphknes

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).