Rocket German Reviews

Rocket Spanish is quite engaging. It has a good mix of verbal, written and listening practice, addressing different learning styles. The balance between speaking and learning the grammar is excellent. Amy and Mauricio are excellent Spanish mentors whose voices are pleasant, easy to listen to and encouraging.

The Rocket German course has been really enjoyable. It is a nice blend of conversational learning and basic vocabulary. The only improvement I see is to have more in the beginning to describe the different verb tenses with the different pronouns to start the foundation of learning, but you catch on to it with a lot of repetition. The one feature I really like is the voice recognition accuracy that allows you to perfect the pronunciation. A+ for that feature!

I've only just started my course and am on module 1. However I am really enjoying it and find the course much better than a short course I did recently. I find it a much better course for teaching modern conversational German. As the previous one was more academic. I would prefer if the mobile app was tweaked so that the screen remained always on and not slept while being used in the car. That aside I can highly recommend the course however.

The strengths: - The program is mainly focused on learning useful German from the beginning, familiarising the user with common interactions they might have early on.
- The podcasts are entertaining and stop the learning process from becoming boring.
- Easily recommendable, and from what I have heard from reviews of the product, Rocket Languages seem to care about improvements.

The weaknesses: I might be wrong on this, but I feel that a basic explanation of conjugations comes too late, and at first you are forced to entirely learn new words and not to figure out that a lot of different words are just conjugations of one word. For me, I was already familiar with German so this wasn't a problem. I would then recommend to anyone who is using this product and is completely new to German, to learn about basic sentence structure and conjugations from other sources to aid this course.

I am satisfied with the service and I have a suggestion what can be improved further. I like the idea of a comprehensive course available at any time. What I miss is downloadable audios - not the dialogues, but the phrases. The phrases are extremely important and helpful in learning a language. I could easily skip dialogues (I don't), let alone those long 25-minute audios with lots of talk in English (enjoyable but mostly waste of time to be honest, too much of unnecessary chatter). So far I have been sitting in front of my monitor for hours to learn the language, staying focused which is a key to learning. But this is such a luxury which you only enjoy in rare periods during your annual cycle. Most of the time you end up downprioritising the language course due to other urgences. I could use recorded phrases - all of them in a lesson or, even better, those I mark with a star for my own collection which also is a nice service - to listen to them while I have no time to sit down at my desk.

While I am enjoying, and learning from Rocket language I have two major gripes. 1) Many of the conversations are between to native English speakers who do not pronounce like native Germans (Which is the goal of language learning) and the audio "lesson" can get rather tedious and forced sounding. 2) On many of the conversations, when you "play as..." if the person laughs, moans, chuckles, or makes other noncommittal noises, you still must sound exactly like they do to pass that section, even though I can intentionally mispronounce words in hard mode and it will pass me to the next section otherwise.

Overall, I've enjoyed the Rocket German product. It would be very helpful to have a set of audio control buttons (play/pause/rewind 3 sec) positioned directly beneath the Quick Settings on the left margin of the web page for the interactive lessons. When I listen to the interactive lessons on a computer, I constantly have to scroll from the line in the lesson back to the top of the page to pause/replay a word/phrase. Similarly, a rewind 3 sec button on the phone version is desperately needed. Lastly, I would like to see a video option for the Language & Culture Lessons. Reading through all of this is a little dry. I want to watch/hear an instructor saying these words/phrases. Thanks

Great course - it gets you speaking from day one. The interactive approach is very useful.
Only complaint is the Language and culture section which is very dry as it's mostly lists and lists of vocab/sample sentences.

I wish there was a way to make the pronunciations slower. To enunciate each syllable or sound. The narrator goes so fast sometimes I am unable to pick up the sounds.
Other than that, for me this works great. Now just figure out a way to make me find the time to use it.

I am enjoying this learning system. It gets right down to business and I like that.