Rocket Languages Reviews

The accent is laughable. As in, my spanish friends couldn't stop laughing. It's Mexican spanish, in a bad accent. The plays and lessons are mired in stereotypes, sexist, and awful. As far as actually learning Spanish goes, I'm struggling on with it, but I can't say it's really helped so far. Hopefully it will start sticking, but having spent six weeks in Madrid recently, I didn't feel this course helped me at all, and I was still struggling with even the most basic conversations. There doesn't seem to be any background to the lessons, or intricacies of the verbs and their conjugations, which are just brushed over.
I've paid for it now, so will keep persevering for the moment, but I regret the purchase.

I think more emphasize should be placed in Hangul! Its the foundation of the language and everything is so jumbled. Consonant, vowels should be separated and thought differently. I learned by watch children videos of sing alongs in Hangul. Like they make it so simple there. Its ok I guess... It needs more material to be concise. But good program

Learning languages is really nice here; it sticks. Reciting the vocabulary and having it "graded" is really helpful for pronunciation. The "Play It!" portion is extremely helpful when it comes to being able to speak the language on cue. And when you're learning Russian, like me, or a language with a different writing system, "Write It!" can be frustrating and challenging yet extremely beneficial.

Following the verbiage on the conversation pieces is great When repeating the words given in vocabulary, the words are spoken way too fast and it is hard to understand or to keep up with it. My recommendation would be to speak those words slower so the non-native speaker can follow easily regardless of age or where are you from. Also, the flashcards need sound for it.

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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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.

Although I am making progress learning Spanish, the app has several bugs that have certainly affected my pace of learning. Missing translations/text are not uncommon. Sometimes it takes deleting and reinstalling the app to get it working. On some lessons it simply will not work no matter what action you take. Customer support has not been able to resolve the matter and I have decided that you get what you pay for. With the regular discounts offered as well as the supposed one-time price cut to entice you to buy all 3 level at the onset, I found the course fairly inexpensive. If the bugs ever get worked out, I would then consider this one of the best language courses available.

Voice recognition is very variable with certain short words. eg un, deux trois. The rest of the numbers appear fine. How do you get better than 35% on a one word answer eg être?
Overall I think the programme is very good

I don't like that the woman speaks Spanish with an american accent.
I would like to learn correct pronunciation from natives, not american speaking with accent

When I was using Rosetta Stone, whenever I opened it (and I could always find access) it opened to wherever I had left off. That would all be very helpful for Rocket language to offer and it doesn't, or I don't know how to find it. Perhaps I could get some help.