Rocket Languages Reviews

So far so good! I feel as if I'm back in school learning espanol! I cannot wait to try and speak to my new Costa Rican friends!! If I wasn't already excited, now I'm feeling a rad bit for confident with some new Spanish vocabulary!!

It seems to be working. I've never tried to learn another language but this course has taught me a lot so far and I believe it's teaching me fairly well. I believe there is too much hand holding so far in the beginner course. The translation leans too far on the English side of things and that creates problems. When the English phrase is too far removed from the Japanese translation you end up having to create a middle ground phrase to translate the translation. Some of the phrases translate well to very proper English and would make more sense in my mind, even if that's now how people regularly talk in America. Sometimes a literal translation would do a better job in teaching how phrases will be constructed in Japanese vs English. There are too many instances where I have to figure out how the course is trying to teach something before I can move forward with learning it. Sometimes this takes the form of inconsistencies in the flash cards. I bought the entire Japanese language course on sale and I think that it was pricey but fair. I don't plan on buying any other language courses any time soon, but if I did I would probably buy one from another company simply out of curiosity. I would recommend the Japanese courses to a friend.

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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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.

I've only done the trial version but I decided not to buy it not because of the content; the material is quite good actually and, considering it's for life, the price is fair as well. But the activities cannot be done through mobile or app properly, the recording won't recognize what's said, the written activities never goes on to the next, the platform only works properly on desktop PC and the whole purpose is that you can learn anywhere, whenever. If I can't use my mobile and be alone when recording my pronunciation or I can't answer the cards on my free time then the "anywhere/whenever" thing is null

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

Very poor experience regarding the numerous simple spelling mistakes and inconsistent and sometimes just plain wrong translations. I expected much more from a paid for language learning tool.

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 like Rocket French and have found it helpful, but if you're a person who doesn't memorize sentences well in order to repeat them back orally or in writing, you may get frustrated. I can actually converse in French at an intermediate level, but I'm not able to memorize these lesson passages because, in the moment of studying, their only importance is as text to attach to my brain long enough to recant for the machine. Frankly, I don't learn fluidity from memorizing but from composing my own sentences, so I much prefer studying the vocabulary and the grammar, and those lessons here are very good and give me the needed tools. I think it would be a lot of work, but it would be cool if Rocket French could restructure for an experience that involved less rote repetition of longer texts. If you don't think you'd be disappointed by this, then it may be perfect for you.

I'm really enjoying using Rocket French. The lessons are interesting and easy to follow. The language recognition is excellent and works well in both understanding and correction. The only small problem is that it doesn't sync well across my devices. It doesn't seem to recognise when I've completed a lesson on a different device. I'm sure this will be fixed with updates. Overall it's a fantastic learning tool.