Rocket Languages Reviews

I really don't need to hear Amy's terrible American tourist accent, and I don't know why she shows up in the entire Level 1. I hope they replace her and re-do the audios again someday. Other than that, it's a great course.

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.

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.

I was very happy with the program until the new format. The functionality when using an iPad has significantly deteriorated. In particular, I am unhappy with now being unable to replay pronunciation in order to compare with the speaker. My voice recordings are frequently cut off in mid-phrase. Basically, the program is no longer user friendly for people owning iPads. I no longer will recommend this program to my friends. In fact I am traveling to Europe this summer with some friends and I have told them to find another program. We are going to brush up on different languages prior to traveling.

One major flaw, which is very frustrating. That is the speech recognition software is of poor quality. I do not know why this was not pretested better. But when saying the same words the same way results in a much higher score there has to be a problem. I listen to my voice played back, and it sounds much more like the Russian speaker's voice than the guess printed by the software. Often with time and no changes necessary it will register 100%. But often it will keep on asking for a repeat. It becomes very tedious. Otherwise the package is well designed, with a grammar emphasis which is necessary but often missing from other packages. So using this package I know why and how I am making a mistake. I have used another package in conjunction with this, but the other package is not sufficient by its own because although memory of the language improves, better understanding of the language is very slow. Rocket Russian helps this.

I am a visual learner,
so I need a visual phonetic interpretation of the language
before I can pronounce it.
Unfortunately,
Rocket Language only does this to my pronunciation attempt.

I thought all the lessons would be audio such that you could listen in your car or with headphones while working out or walking but some require you to read and hear. I think even alphabet, numbers and grammar can all be made in an audio version. Also, I do not like the fact that you can’t stop and review an audio lesson. At least on an iPhone you can't just stop a lesson and go back to the beginning. You have to let it play out until the end to start over.

As most people say the speech recognition, whether if I use a wired microphone, airpods or powerbeats, Rocket does not work consistently when speaking. My girlfriend got so frustrated that she went back to Duolingo. I am using chrome and it is up to date. Rocket is good but if you cannot practice speech then it is subpar. This problem is common in the the comments so why can't it be rectified???

Course #1's audio lessons were really excellent. The timing of the dialogue/repeat sections is spot on, the native speakers have very clear accents, and you learn a lot quite quickly. It is easy to put them on in the background and make several additional passes through the material to cement the teachings. I found the accompanying grammar lessons to be difficult to retain in the 'mostly text' format, and they often don't follow along with where you are in the audio lessons at all.

Course #2 is somewhat the opposite. The native speakers (and host) all have distinct accents, the dialogue timing is a mess, and the content is all over the place. One minute you're basically redoing a lesson from Course #1, and the next you're totally lost when everything switches to 'casual' speech, which you've had almost no exposure to thus far. Alternately, the grammar courses are now structured to expound upon specific parts of the audio, which is an improvement.

I was VERY happy with Course #1 overall, but I am soured on the audio portion of Course #2. When the dialogue-repeat sections sometimes go word-by-word, but give you 10 seconds to speak, it becomes very difficult to learn the line in entirety.

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hi. i didn't feel like 7 days was a long enough trial. with working all day and a household to run at night that doesn't leave much time to get even a little grip on the language. i find the price a little too high for me. i'm a single mom of 4. not easy