Rocket Languages Reviews

I find Alessando’s dumbing down side comments unnecessary and interrupts concentration. Childish, tedious and unprofessional. Thank you.

J'ai vraiment aimé ce programme mais je ne le fais que pour l'école

Early days yet. I can read Italian, more-or-less, because I learned Latin up to A-Level and speak reasonable French and basic Spanish. But the Rocket course, so far, looks like what I need if we're going to fulfill our ambition of renting an apartment in Venice for two or three months in 2022. You can't just go and live in another country on the basis that you'll shout at the locals in English.

As to the star ratings, however, there should be a category for 'Not applicable'. Having bought Rocket Italian I don't need to buy it again and I haven't yet had need of customer service - so I'm giving those one star.

Not truly rating yet, Really, I just started it. Only on lesson 1.1. Not sufficient to judge. Using this along with other sources, Penguin book, Living languages CDs and Duolingo and Master Russian online, plus a few other lesser sources. Plus I'm already familiar with the Cyrillic alphabet as I used it in the Air Force back in 1962-4. I'm 76 now and not in a hurry as I have no place to use Russian, just keeping the brain active. Thus most of the vocabulary and some of the theory of lessons 1.1 and 1.2, I already am already familiar with from the other sources. Each course also has differing additional vocabulary. Having said that, I do like being able to hear and mimic the pronunciations and working through the exercises to help remember the vocabulary. It is impossible to rate a program so soon. I would prefer to do my rating after a month or so when I really know what to rate. Stay tuned.

I have been using Rocket for about a week and am actually learning to speak Spanish

I like how the course gives you instant ability to say full sentences, and doesn't just focus on vocabulary or grammar separately. Everything is integrated. The phrases are also very relevant and useful. I also enjoy the mix of culture and language that is taught.
There are some aspects of the course that I don't find as useful, such as the 'Write It' and 'Flashcard' components, only because I don't feel they are benefiting me and I feel they are sort of tedious and a chore. I like the quizzes and the ability to practice saying the phrases in the 'Know It' section.

Affordable compared to RS. Like not having to use discs and being able to use a tablet. Like the grammar explanations, but haven't yet found all of the verb tenses in Spanish premium. Admittedly though, I've been quite lazy and haven't used the program as much as I should. It's not a program that makes you can't wait to get back to it. You need to be self motivated. I suppose that's true of the others, too.

I think the overall teaching style of this program is pretty great, but the execution is not there yet.

The major shortcoming is the male's pronunciation. I am a complete beginner to studying Chinese, but it's incredibly obvious his pronunciation is absolutely awful. During the conversations, I can understand the female perfectly fine, but I still can't understand the male speaker well even after studying the lesson. I also worry that I may pick up bad habits myself even listening to his speech.

Another minor drawback is that I do not believe there is a way to zoom in or make the characters larger on the mobile app, which is unfortunate since I tend to study these lessons while exercising on an elliptical or other cardio machine, so the phone is a fair distance away from my eyes.

A feature I wish they would add in the future is increased robustness of the conversations. Instead of teaching us exactly one perfectly scripted conversation, teach us variations. Most of the time there are a handful of different ways someone could say the same thing, so even if the conversation is relatively simple in content, learning just one specific tightly scripted conversation is going to be pretty useless once you step out into the real world.

Overall, Rocket Chinese is founded on good ideas and has solid potential, I hope it will strive to improve and live up to the potential I see.

One major flaw, which is very frustrating. That is the speech recognition software is of poor quality. I do not know why this was not pretested better. But when saying the same words the same way results in a much higher score there has to be a problem. I listen to my voice played back, and it sounds much more like the Russian speaker's voice than the guess printed by the software. Often with time and no changes necessary it will register 100%. But often it will keep on asking for a repeat. It becomes very tedious. Otherwise the package is well designed, with a grammar emphasis which is necessary but often missing from other packages. So using this package I know why and how I am making a mistake. I have used another package in conjunction with this, but the other package is not sufficient by its own because although memory of the language improves, better understanding of the language is very slow. Rocket Russian helps this.

I have tried rosetta stone live mocha and berlitz. It is simple easy cost effective method of learning spanish. i have tried other software. This is great learning tool. i have tried arabic language course before. that was also good. I can learn on my pace flex schedule.