Rocket Languages Reviews

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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I am about ready to give up on you. I was going to do another lesson tonight, but when i saw my percentage completion on Module 1 and 2 was at 93% instead of the 100% that was there this morning. How do you expect anyone to complete anything if you keep adding new, and in my case, unnecessary, lessons to the areas already completed?

Overall the course has some good points and some not so good,

The good is the audio course, I am not sure how far it can get you towards fluency but every little helps and the course does present information well. I found the banter a tad annoying at first but it's grown on me and I have come across stuff that i haven't seen elsewhere. My feeling is that it will get you no further than basic communication and that michel thomas method is far better, as is pimsleur and paul noble. I think their methods get you speaking and understanding more effectively and more quickly; that said this is a good supplement to other learning systems.

The bad for me is the grammar section. It is basically just explanations that could have come from any textbook but without exercises that support the material very well. I think for what they are doing here a textbook is a better option, its cheaper and you will get better reinforcement of the lessons. In fact the quizes attached seem completely irrelevant and are just vocab memorization.

The quizzes for the most part are just dull to be honest.

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Been doing the Rocket German for about 3 months. So far, I've enjoyed it for the most part and am looking forward to getting into the second Level. My one complaint/suggestion is that I find the written lessons to be poorly set up. The focus looks like it is supposed to be on grammar in many lessons, yet they are taught with 20+ new vocabulary words in many of them. So instead of focusing on the new grammar rules, you get lost trying to figure out what all of the new vocabulary is. Would suggest using only words already known when first introducing a grammar lesson so that the focus is kept on the grammar and not diverted to the new words. I've come out of several of the written lessons with no more knowledge of the grammar rules then when I went in because 90% of the examples were with new vocabulary. Audio lessons are great though, and overall I still think there are many positives. Looking forward to the updated level one German whenever it is due out.

I think there is a lot of hard work that has been put into these products, but there is just way to much English. I want to hear introductions my name is , i am your host all in my target language from lesson 1 then 100 lessons in it is all so natural....here I tested level 2 but started with so much English. We need to be flooded with our target language and get the explanations later.

German Level 1 was great - detailed and thorough, moving at a good pace. I have just started Level 2, and it is a different thing entirely, and unfortunately not at all good. It seems to have been botched together from a previous, separate attempt at a course (the numbered Audio lessons are completely different in the lesson plan and in the audio track), and it doesn't follow on from Level 1 in any meaningful way (there’s repetition of stuff we've already covered).

Most disappointing is a dramatic drop in quality of the Language lessons. The grammar explanations are much shorter, and leave gaps and questions unanswered. The lessons on Dative and Genitive are terrible - cursory explanations and patchy examples. Example sentences either display grammatical features which go wholly unexplained in the text; or fail to display the relevant grammar at all. Poorly thought out, and a frustrating contrast to the excellent Level 1.

I cannot tell you how frustrating it is to try to use this program. The program has so much trouble hearing what I'm repeating back to it. The company's FAQ says to use headsets; I am. Then it says it's because they have it tuned to "native speakers." Well, what good does that do a person who is not native? I don't think native speakers are using RF! I'm not new to the French language so my pronunciation is not bad. I can only imagine how annoyed someone completely new to this would be feeling right now. If it's anything close to how I feel, it's not very good.

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.

A good way to learn some basic language skills that can assist with getting around a foreign country.

The only reservation I have is the fact that basic, essential grammar is not part of the first lessons. For instance, basic conjugations of "to be" or "to have" are not detailed and explained, but simply mentioned during lessons.
This is a problem since the grammar of the Spanish language is different than of the English language.
With this exception, I am content with the quality of the course.