Rocket Japanese Reviews

Well, I would be happier if I could do it for free longer because I'm only 15 and I dont have any money to pay for it, but it has been extremely helpful in the lessons I can do. I can now say greetings (basic ones), and know that Atatakai is hot in japanese, which is good to know because if I go to Japan, I would like to know how to get a good, hot cup of coffee. So, overall, great for people who can actually pay for it, not for those who can't.

The voice recognition works pretty well. It struggles with very short sounds, but overall very good. I've used other programs that ask you to speak the answers, but the pronunciation analysis makes me try much harder to say each response out loud.

The romaji is good for beginners, but already know hiragana and katakana, so the romaji is very distracting. I wish there was an option to turn off romaji so I can practice reading.

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I am a bilingual person (translator from English into French) trying to learn Japanese. I've been trying several methods books, on-line, etc., over several years. Even though this method is far more interesting and educational than Rosetta, I feel that it is lacking of grammatical points or explanations, so to be a complete learner, you need to complement it by another mean (books or apps). After saying that, I will still recommend this on-line method, since I believe it is one of the best today.
Improvements:
The testing system: it would be more educational to be testing more than 5 (Japanese 2) or 10 questions (Japanese 2), while the listen and writing, test you on over 30 questions.
Even though the voice recognition improve dramatically over the years, it is still sometimes difficult to use it, especially with long sentence in the Play role section. The system stops before I say half of the sentences. It works fine most of the time with single word.
The first audio is too long and have a lot of unnecessary moments. For example, why practicing to say a word or sentence when it is listed in the vocabulary section in which you can learn how to say it as well? Also, to be honest, Kenny's voice is a little annoying after a while.

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Rocket languages supply "Translation method" for learning 2nd Languages . It's the same as in the school. There worse has no photos to understand by view , no stroke order .
Too many lessons for beginners .

I am hoping that within a year of this program I will be able to Speak Japanese to my co workers. Its much better than Rosetta Stone. I just wish this program explained at very beginning why certain words are used in the sentence like ga, wa, no, imasu, desu and masu so it can be applied instead of just memorized.

I used to really enjoy these lessons (taking the Japanese course). The banter between tutors Sayaka and the original Kenny made lessons enjoyable and fun. Since I had returned from my trip to Japan I had taken a short break from practicing, but I recently jumped back on only to learn that the original audio lessons have been replaced with a super boring monotoned narrator. While the program did initially help me impress all of my Japanese friends, it no longer feels like I have lifelike tutors to encourage me to keep up my studies, just a robot with choppy cut and paste vocabulary being lectured at me. The enthusiasm of the lessons is gone and sadly so is mine with learning from this program.

I agree with several reviewers that the narrator, Sarah is possibly the most monotone person on the planet. I mean, she gives Ben Stein a run for his money. The product idea is great and when it's working properly, it's the best on the market. Unfortunately, I can't gove it five or even four stars as it's just too buggy (sometimes the audio doesn't play or double plays - sounds like there are two Sayakas or Kennys competing for my attention - or the mic doesn't work at times). Hopefully, those are fixed soon!

My feelings with this course are quite mixed. On one hand, there is a lot of material and you pick up useful phrases from the very start. On the other hand there are several issues which in the long run are quite frustrating especially in the testing part

1) Apart from the Quiz section, everything else is clearly automatically generated from the material. This means you can have the same word repeated 2 or 3 times. In the "Know it" part there are cases where you cannot know what to say because two words have the same english translation (tourist).
2) Speech recognition is frustrating. It stops listening while you are talking, sometimes it doesn't want to recognize what you say no matter what (I even tried playing back the native audio from my phone near to the computer microphone, and it didn't even recognize the native speaker!) and sometimes it says 100% even if you mess up a few syllables.

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TL:DR -These courses are worth bothering with and a fair deal but don't expect perfection or a miracles.

This was sold to me (by external reviews) as being better than Rosetta stone and the current market leader in comprehensive language learning for self study, and yeah it is better and may be the best all around, but it's still far from perfect. There are other products that are distinctly better for certain aspects of Japanese study, but this one is a good all-rounder.

It is very much like a by the book language study course that you would get in a generic language school.
It's not groundbreaking, but it's very solid and should successfully teach any diligent student some extent of their target language.

Given that you get hundreds of hours of lessons that you can do at your own pace I think the price is great value but I can't quite give 5 stars because there are some flaws in the product and service.

Unlike many free apps you aren't limited to 5 or 10 mins per day which means that the system can take its time to teach you slowly and methodically, and that if you have a lot of free time (and almost everybody does at the time of writing mid-April 2020) then you can do an hour or more everyday.

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It is a good program/service, I think good value for money. But the voice detection I assume is non-existent. Why? For any word in the Japanese module, I can say anything and I get recorded as correct. Nami (Name) I can say "Yellow" or "Brick" or "Superman", they all register as points. So both the voice detection and points system is rather irrelevant in its current state. But if you come for the exposure to words, practice out-loud yourself and don't need some software telling you that you are hitting the mark correctly, I think it is still worth it. It would be worth getting some quality A.I. software that really does test one's pronunciation of native speech - the one Rosetta Stone 3 had was pretty good, but their product has gone down hill since then.