Rocket French Reviews

Overall the course has some good points and some not so good,

The good is the audio course, I am not sure how far it can get you towards fluency but every little helps and the course does present information well. I found the banter a tad annoying at first but it's grown on me and I have come across stuff that i haven't seen elsewhere. My feeling is that it will get you no further than basic communication and that michel thomas method is far better, as is pimsleur and paul noble. I think their methods get you speaking and understanding more effectively and more quickly; that said this is a good supplement to other learning systems.

The bad for me is the grammar section. It is basically just explanations that could have come from any textbook but without exercises that support the material very well. I think for what they are doing here a textbook is a better option, its cheaper and you will get better reinforcement of the lessons. In fact the quizes attached seem completely irrelevant and are just vocab memorization.

The quizzes for the most part are just dull to be honest.

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I cannot tell you how frustrating it is to try to use this program. The program has so much trouble hearing what I'm repeating back to it. The company's FAQ says to use headsets; I am. Then it says it's because they have it tuned to "native speakers." Well, what good does that do a person who is not native? I don't think native speakers are using RF! I'm not new to the French language so my pronunciation is not bad. I can only imagine how annoyed someone completely new to this would be feeling right now. If it's anything close to how I feel, it's not very good.

Wish there was more grammar lessons and verb conjugations.

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 emphasis 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.

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It is WAY to expensive for what it is! Not worth it.

Very poor experience regarding the numerous simple spelling mistakes and inconsistent and sometimes just plain wrong translations. I expected much more from a paid for language learning tool.

I am a visual learner,
so I need a visual phonetic interpretation of the language
before I can pronounce it.
Unfortunately,
Rocket Language only does this to my pronunciation attempt.

Overall, I think the Rocket French folks have developed a pretty good system to learn French, so I won't go into detail about the things that I like. The big downside, however, is how their system tracks how far you've progressed in each module. For example, I just finished module 3.9, and the icons have changed from no color to the following colors and comments:

FLASHCARDS = ORANGE (GOOD)
HEAR-IT = ORANGE (GOOD)
WRITE-IT = ORANGE (GOOD)
KNOW-IT = ORANGE (GOOD)
QUIZ = GREEN (EASY)

That is not sufficient. What I want (and need) to know is how often I have reviewed each module and how I have done each time. So I have created an offline spreadsheet that shows the following for each section that I have studied. For example here is how I have tracked section 3.4 that I have reviewed several times and self-graded:

11/8/22 = D, 11/9/22 = C, 11/20/22 = C, 11/23/22 = B

You can see that first studied this module on 11/8/22, and then reviewed is subsequently three times, and my self-grade has improved from the initial D to a B. And, instead of a self-grade, I would much prefer to see the percentage of answers I got right.

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You aren't hearing me on about 30% of the words. Maybe it would be better with a headset - I am just using a laptop with the built in mic. But I've tried many times with my mouth in many different positions and different proximities to the mic - it should be able to hear me just fine.