Rocket Italian Reviews

Minus one star for the poor voice recognition performance. It would be 5 stars if that wasn't so inconsistent. Also, price at a discount is okay. I don't think I would buy again at full price. I may feel differently once I've finished the course.

Despite having studied Italian for years, I am still uncomfortable trying to actually speak the language. With Rocket lessons I have gone back to the beginning and am nicely closing up some of the holes in my knowledge of the language. I am hoping to soon become more at ease with with Italian and more willing to actually test the skills that I am clearly acquiring with my Rocket Languages course.

This course was recommended online after my CD Roms from Rosetta Stone became totally useless with the disappearance of Adobe Flashplayer. The price is reasonable and the practice is quite good.

For the price this is a very good program and the interactive sections are easy to understand. I've used other online programs and so far this one is the best. My main dissatisfaction with it has to do with the organization of the information presented. After the self study sections it would make sense to use the new vocabulary and/or concepts presented during the interactive lessons. For example: There's an entire lesson dealing with the weather but no where in the succeeding interactive lessons is there any discussion of weather. When vocabulary is not used, it's easily forgotten. And you end up with little sense of how to include it in conversation. Also, when new grammatical concepts are introduced in the interactive lessons there isn't always a discussion of the concept. Examples: (1) Nel, nella, negli are presented in unit 4. It's a completely new group of prepositional phrases, but there's no explanation. (2) When nouns ending in E are pluralized, the ending is always i (as in the masculine) regardless of whether the noun is masculine or feminine. I purchased an Italian grammar book and was able to clear up my confusion around this, but it should have been mentioned in one of the lessons where a plural feminine noun ended in an i. These are just the most recent issues of this kind I've encountered. There are more. So, more thought regarding organization and presentation would be warranted.

Lots of variety and also different ways of learning

I have liked the program so far but here are my main criticisms:
First, the pacing. I wouldn't say I like having 5 audio lessons consecutively and then 5 language and culture lessons in a row. I prefer to have one audio and one language and culture lesson each time. I also wish these two types of lessons were more related and interconnected. they seem so disjointed and irrelevant right now.
I also wish that there was some sort of spaced repetition feature for reviewing previously learned vocabulary and materials. Therefore I have to manually make flashcards in another program (Anki) for this which is a little cumbersome than having them readily available.
I would like to see some new features for exercising the learned vocabulary and grammar instead of just repeating the limited number of sentences in each lesson and requiring the students to form and come up with new sentences.

Over the years, I have used Rosetta Stone, Babbel and now Rocket. Rocket is what I have been using to learn Italian as I used Rosetta Stone for Spanish mainly. There are things about this I like for learning but I feel this pushes too far toward memorization and not concept or forming sentences and mental recall. I have been doing the daily lesson for 3 straight weeks. I have a good bank of vocabulary, but I am struggling forming sentences for the most part. I will see this through Level 1 for sure and most likely 2, to see how effective it is. I felt more progress at this point through Rosetta stone and their style of learning, but I did it for 6 months daily. Time will tell for Rocket but I am going to go into with my mind open and following their method.

Using this program makes me feel confident in learning Italian.

I used Rocket Italian for several years and the used several other language apps, however, none were as complete as Rocker Italian. Also, with the recent changes to the Rocker Italian format, I feel more comfortable knowing that it is using the CEFR format.

only on day three at the moment
but
so far so good