Rocket Languages Reviews

Much better than Rosetta Stone.. I just came back from Asia and from what I learned from Rocket. it helped a lot. Plus, the price and ease of usage...unbelievable. If you put in the time and effort, it will pay for itself.

I love Rocket Chinese - at this stage being a novice - I feel the more exposure to a variety of formats to learning Chinese really breaks up the monotony of trying to learn and helps me to understand quicker .
Many thanks, Peter

Even if the cost scared me, I have walked through just to try to follow a friend suggestion (and furthermore because it is explained that you have six months to get back your money if you are not convinced by the method).
Sincerely I don't regret for the moment. The lessons are easy to understand and we really feel a quick progression of our langage level.

If I just have a recommandation for the Rocketlangages teachers, I would appreciate to have a chinese Dictionnary which one countains all the words we saw, and a second dictionnary more complete.

Best wishes and good continuation.

Sincerely,

Jeremy

Read More

I have so many things to say about Rocket Chinese I don't know where to start. How about the beginning...

I have been interested in learning Chinese for a year now. I have five programs, three I obtained for free and two I paid for. Of the three I found for free, one came from my local library, I didn't feel bad about making a copy because they are public domain, two I downloaded from the Internet and there was no charge.

They are all good programs, I know because I am very critical and skeptical due to the numbers of programs available, I felt I could go broke trying to find a good teaching program for learning Chinese. Of the two programs that I bought one was from a University and one is the Rocket Chinese language course.

The one from the University is good, but I expected much more form a University language course and it is no where near as comprehensive as Rocket Chinese, but to keep things honest, I paid less for the University course.

Impressive site layout and audio pronunciation of words and phrases. Downloadable lessons are a real plus and are great for training on the go or while working out or riding my bike. The survival kit is a real bonus for focusing on specific areas or themes. Rocket will be a definitely be "value-added" in helping me to prepare for my move to Shanghai next year.

I am just restarting to learn Mandarin using Rocket Chinese because I had been too busy teaching and building new courses at my current school in China.

Positive:
1. Listening, Reading (in pinyin - latin script and Simplified - chinese script), Writing (initially in pinyin) and speaking is available from the very first lesson.
2. Step by step in a logical fashion based on what would seem to be logical needs of a person new to learning the language.
3. Clear and colourful interface that is easy to follow.
4. There are now cute little incentive badges that give you a sense of your progress. These complement the already colourful interface, but I think this is helpful for both younger and older learners

While I like the course layout very much, there are just a couple of tiny problems that I suspect will be addressed quite quickly on the technical side.

1. I haven't yet figured out how to prevent my browser (Firefox) from asking permission everytime RocketChinese wants to use the camera/microphone. Because I am used to the 7/24 customer service, email is obviously slower, but their responses are usually within 24 hours... so, not intolerable.
2.

Read More

What I like about Rocket Chinese are:

+Writing part: Makes you understand the strange writing system which the Chinese people use. Video recording on how to write letters makes you visualize how you are going to do this, instead of only knowing the theory.

+Audio lessons: Its like a good conversation. Good mood. Nice personalities. Possible to upload to mobile.

+Design: Simple. Progress is showed at the top and give you a little bit more motivation.

+Culture: Interesting reading throughout the learning. Makes you understand China a little bit more.

I loved the course!! Ms. Lin Ping did an outstanding job and so did David Lewis. I would definately recommend it to my friends. It is a fabulous experience. I would definately give it a good try. Thanks again for introducing rocket Chinese! It was great..

The record with voice recognition grading really helps to get your pronunciation right, and the playback of your voice really helps you find out why you did get the grade you expected. These tools give a strong incentive to practice speaking, and have helped me to progress faster. The downside is that these tools are only practically useful on PC and not useful on Android because of speed and different limited web page. (I cannot speak for Apple versions).

I would give the course 5 stars if all features were available on all platforms.

On android viewing the website, speech recognition is so much slower to respond, and much less accurate, so the time delays become frustrating - it is very dependent on internet and wireless speed. The key thing android misses is it that it has no ability to play back what you said (so that you can hear and correct your own mistakes). From the forum comments this appears to have been missing for 2 years or more, and I think Rocket Languages should make playback of your own voice a priority fix for android users.

Read More