Rocket French Reviews

Pros:

The reinforcement of the Hear it, Say It, Write it and Know it activities.
The flash cards - and the ability to customize your flashcards.
Learning phrases as opposed to just vocabulary
The point, progress and streak information.
The Rocket Fuel emails are very helpful.

Cons:
I could locate only one pronunciation lesson. It would be help to have more. (Note: that lessons indicates that there is further help included in lesson 3.6, but that doesn't appear to be a pronunciation lesson.)
Some of the audio, done by the native speaker, is unclear. Either the first portion of the audio is cut short, or there is lack of clarity in the audio.

Because of the clarity issues of the audio, I become quickly frustrated. I've verified that the issue is with the audio itself by trying a headset and bluetooth speakers, comparing them with other audios. Unfortunatly, this single issue is my reason for cancellation. :(

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.

I am finding the program difficult to use. I cannot access the written or quiz sections. It is also a problem trying to access the subsequent module. I wish I had purchased only Level 1. The opportunity to listen and have my pronunciation corrected is appreciated but I would like to be able to access the rest of the module segments.

I like Rocket French and have found it helpful, but if you're a person who doesn't memorize sentences well in order to repeat them back orally or in writing, you may get frustrated. I can actually converse in French at an intermediate level, but I'm not able to memorize these lesson passages because, in the moment of studying, their only importance is as text to attach to my brain long enough to recant for the machine. Frankly, I don't learn fluidity from memorizing but from composing my own sentences, so I much prefer studying the vocabulary and the grammar, and those lessons here are very good and give me the needed tools. I think it would be a lot of work, but it would be cool if Rocket French could restructure for an experience that involved less rote repetition of longer texts. If you don't think you'd be disappointed by this, then it may be perfect for you.

It's so annoying. The microphone won't work. It keeps on saying "no speech detected," even when I am yelling it out in a quiet environment.

Voice recognition is very variable with certain short words. eg un, deux trois. The rest of the numbers appear fine. How do you get better than 35% on a one word answer eg être?
Overall I think the programme is very good

Wish there was more grammar lessons and verb conjugations.

I have been using the program for about a month and a half now and I have found it somewhat useful. My level is above that of a new beginner but not quite yet intermediate. My concerns about the program, starting with the idea that most people want what will be most useful i.e. picking up useful spoken language for travel, is that particularly when testing, the program expects your responses to be almost in the same order as their introduction. If the expected answer starts with Tu and you use the Vous form, you are marked as incorrect. The program should note what form is wanted. A "hint" function also would be nice to help someone with responses as learning, not just simple memorization, is the goal. The program also occasionally makes some unexpected detours from what is useful. For example, one lesson moved from general travel issues to a flight of fancy to go skiing. I did not find a lot of useful information in that lesson. Finally, today I took a test which contained a large number of questions involving the "passe simple". The last question on the test asked how much one would expect to hear the passe simple and the correct answer was "almost never". So, I feel a lot of time was wasted that could have been better spent elsewhere. I hope these comments are considered helpful. There are good things here but a few tweaks would make it much better.

The program keeps locking up on me. I am frustrated. Halfway through the pronunciation part I click the red microphone icon for the current word and it doesn't respond. And at that point I can't get the program to do anything. I have no opinion on the Customer Service as I haven't used it yet.

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).