Rocket Japanese Reviews

the audio recognition needs work. Also stop asking me to review every six times i record a word.

What I liked: Grammar lessons and examples. The conversational lessons are generally good, but I thought that some were not really applicable to what I wanted to learn. For example, several focus on "workplace" conversations that don't seem particularly relevant.
What I don't like: The speech recognition program is terrible. I get the impression that Rocket Languages (1) didn't adequately test this program prior to incorporating it into the course, and (2) doesn't seem to be interested in trying to fix it.

The speech recognition module actively detracts from the utility of the course. Please bring back the older speech recognition program or fix this one.

The bottom line: Not recommended due to speech recognition issues.

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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the kanji test in the first lesson is a little too advance

I am just starting Rocket Japanese and so far I quite like it, with one exception so far. I decided to approach learning Japanese methodically and to try to master each concept before moving on. The problem is that in Module 1, there is a section on numbers, and it teaches numbers from 1 to 100,000,000. Obviously, there are patterns and generalizations one can make across the 10s, 100s, 1000s, etc, but there is a lot to learn here in one large gulp and now I have lost my momentum with the language learning. I feel the numbers should be introduced in smaller chunks so that one can progress with new vocabulary and grammar at the same time. I have been bogged down with number learning for days.

I definitely loved it even I just try it for a while. However, the price is so HIGH and EXPENSIVE for a student like me.

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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Course #1's audio lessons were really excellent. The timing of the dialogue/repeat sections is spot on, the native speakers have very clear accents, and you learn a lot quite quickly. It is easy to put them on in the background and make several additional passes through the material to cement the teachings. I found the accompanying grammar lessons to be difficult to retain in the 'mostly text' format, and they often don't follow along with where you are in the audio lessons at all.

Course #2 is somewhat the opposite. The native speakers (and host) all have distinct accents, the dialogue timing is a mess, and the content is all over the place. One minute you're basically redoing a lesson from Course #1, and the next you're totally lost when everything switches to 'casual' speech, which you've had almost no exposure to thus far. Alternately, the grammar courses are now structured to expound upon specific parts of the audio, which is an improvement.

I was VERY happy with Course #1 overall, but I am soured on the audio portion of Course #2. When the dialogue-repeat sections sometimes go word-by-word, but give you 10 seconds to speak, it becomes very difficult to learn the line in entirety.

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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.

Nice conversation planned especially for beginner level .