Rocket Languages Reviews
Find out what actual users have to say about our courses through their Rocket Languages reviews.
I am just 14 years old and I've mastered basic Japanese. I am thankful to Rocket Japanese for letting me know so many things about Japanese language. The modules are perfect and easy for everyone. I would suggest everyone to at least try learning Japanese at the website. I love the customer services as well as the information and experience that Rocket Japanese has given me. Once again thank u so much Rocket Japanese for giving free trials with exceptional knowledge. Thank u.
It is an excellent program that reinforces what you learn. The grading scale is great and the native speakers give you an idea of how to say the words with the correct accent. I also loved that there is extensive training on writing as well as speaking the language. My only complaint is the software is terrible with one syllable words. You have to bypass the automatic rating to get these graded correctly. Everything else is perfect.
Prior to starting Rocket Japanese, I studied the Japanese language for 9 years. I learned how to read at a very high level, but unfortunately was never in a situation where I got to practice speaking and listening. Everything I took in college was textbook based and there was little to no actual conversations. In each chapter there would be a very short dialogue and then that was it, off to reading for the rest of the lesson. Where Rocket excels is that it focuses on audio and allows you to say the vocabulary. This is helping me with my listening skills. Now instead of reading the Japanese subtitles in variety shows, I can also understand more of the spoken language. This approach to learning has helped immensely. I only have a few minor gripes with the program: When writing the Kanji for the Kanji writing section, I'll write it perfect, yet the program marks it as bad and then won't even explain why. It does this at least 2 times every lesson. The repeating section can be near impossible at times. When it gets to the last three, they're expecting you to repeat back a sentence with 10 words in it. I honestly don't have the memorization skills to do that. It doesn't need to be that difficult.
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 its 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.
Its not ground breaking, but its 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.
Response from Rocket Languages
Response from Rocket Languages: Hi Sean - Thanks for submitting a review. Some interesting observations in there! I thought that I would comment on a couple of things;
This year Rocket Japanese is scheduled to have a total review of the course content. We realize that there are some issues and are moving to address those.
With regards the romanization toggle; this seems to be working. Can you please provide screenshots to customer support of where it doesn't seem to be working?
There was an issue with the voice recognition difficulty in that you had to refresh the page for the change to take effect. That has now been rectified, so it should just work.
And we will look into the review system as well. In fact we are re-factoring the entire members area into a new code base, so it's timely to look at some aspects that haven't been looked at for a while. The new version is due out later in the year.
It's grateful to learn lot of different languages, I highly recommend this Rocket Languages web to my family, friends, fellow countrymen & brethren.
I really like this product. I've tried several others over the years and this is the best. I'm especially impressed with how every year the site is improved with updates that actually improve the product. I love how much the writing section has improved, much easier to learn Hiragana and Katakana as well as to learn how to speak the language (with feedback, you are rated plus you can listen to what you actually sound like).
I own Rocket French and Rocket Japanese, all three levels for both languages and am very happy with the results. If you work steady, you will get excellent results.
i just started so far its the best i keep on going back to the recording and hearing myself and i know doesn't sound right so i practice saying it out loud over and over but a great website to start learning
I am always interested in continuing to learn the Japanese language
This is the best language program I have ever used. Excellent, step-wise instruction. Being able to record and listen to myself and compare with a native speaker is invaluable. I supplement the reading and writing part with Duolingo, but Rocket Japanese is the ONLY way to learn! I spend hours on this program and in just over a month, I have learned so much. It is pricey, but well worth it. Actually it would be cheaper than a full fledged in person course. ありがとうございました!!!!
I have found Rocket Japanese to be useful, and frustrating in about equal measures. The voice-recognition is a great idea in helping perfect your pronunciation. Unfortunately I find that about 20% of the time (I haven't kept a count, this is a rough estimate) it simply doesn't work. Either your phrase is not recognised, or deemed incorrect. As a beginner, not knowing if it is you, or the software that is the problem can be insanely frustrating. It doesn't appear to be the longer sentences that suffer from this. The very first sounds we are asked to repeat are riddled with examples. After 3 months it still tells me I can't pronounce 'ka'.
I have finally been prompted to write this because the system tells me I cannot pronounce 'America jin' correctly. Clearly this is an almost native sound to an English speaker, but I mimic the example exactly to no avail. I can forgive these issues, although there are other minor complaints. I have also reported some mistakes in the text, but they remain unchanged. Personally I find that the audio lessons are rather childish, and would be happier if we just got on with the lesson, but I recognise that might just be me being grumpy.
Response from Rocket Languages
Response from Rocket Languages: Hi Andrew, thanks for the detailed feedback. Unfortunately, very short words tend not to work very well with voice recognition as they don't have a lot of context. With regards the lessons themselves, we are in the process of completely redoing the Language & Culture lessons and hope to have those up in the next couple of months. Unfortunately, the pandemic has put a halt to a lot of our activities.