Rocket Japanese Reviews

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 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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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.

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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Shopping as the 3rd lesson? What an absolute joke!

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 .

Rocket languages really gave me the tools to succeed with my new language. It brought me to a level where I was finally comfortable speaking with native speakers and I was able to take off on my own after that. I highly recommend Rocket Languages to all my friends trying to learn a new language. Learning with this system felt practically effortless.

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've been using RocketLanguages for a few years now and prefer it over any other learning program for speech and conversation. Level 1 of RocketJapanese is superb, though the audio lessons of Levels 2 and 3 lack the same clarity and smoothness. The content of the lessons is great and I have no issue with the Japanese speakers, but the English-speaking hosts in Levels 2 and 3 have distractingly poor delivery: the pacing of their sentences is inconsistent, the editing cuts some words too early, and the speakers' intonation and emphasis is very odd, often quite unnatural. When repeating Japanese words immediately after the Japanese speakers do, the english-speaking hosts' pronunciation is so far off I sometimes wonder if the lessons were recorded without the speakers listening to each other. I still get the practice and review in Japanese that I want from the lessons, but not without difficulty listening to the hosts.

It's a great program, and I do recommend it to anyone who asks. The fact that Level 2 was updated is a good sign for the future; if the hosts of the audio lessons in Levels 2 and 3 can be re-recorded to match the rhythm and clarity of intonation that Level 1 has, it'll be top-notch.