Rocket Languages Reviews

The course is effective and I am making progress, but the voice recognition software is very glitchy and inconsistent.

What customer service? I'm only in the first lesson though, so we'll see. I'm an intermediate spanish learner from university classes and took the placement test, but I wish there was a way that would tell me what I need to study or what level to be at so I don't have to pick one at random. It seems kind of expensive compared to other options, I really liked pimsleur a lot too, and rocket spanish doesn't seem as streamlined. It does give practice on speaking though that other sites didn't. I've tried paid Duolingo (level 72), and paid pimsleur (finished Module 2), I even tried paid spanish dictionary.com (which was better than expected), and this is the only one that you don't have a monthly fee for. It also has A TON of content, but lacks some of the gamification of duolingo so it's a little more dry. The learning seems less intuitive and listening based than pimsleur though. I'll update the review if I make it through very much more of rocket spanish, but this was the fourth time it asked for a review so here it is.

I like the interactive part it really helps with memory. So far the voice recognition has been really annoying, maybe because im a perfectionist and when it wont record correctly I cant move on. Also I have not had any grammar lesson on conjugations. If i hadnt had a background in Spanish I think I would be a little lost by now.

So far. The lessons are pretty easy and general. Not much reinforcement after each lesson so that the student retains. I guess I have to commit to practicing and reinforcing each lessson on my own. Also At times the videos are not as fluent (perhaps it is my computer).

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 learning tool.
I'm not happy with the audio it's not working 100%. On average each lesson has 5% faulty audio.
I have complained but the advice is not working, because the fault is in the app it's selves.
The only thing I can do is ignore the gaps and hope.....

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.

1. You could give more practice with the words, before passing to the flashcards.
2. More activities can be introduced, such as putting in the missing words in the sentences, and others like those. Currently, the major way of learning is merely the typical drills. It is too much technical, which is good if it is something additional, but without the greater variety of the exercised it is too inhuman, and somewhat boring. I am also comparing it with the Babbel, and they have some adaptions to the humans, when the dialog is going on, and one has to add the missing words. So, more human like activities would be useful.
Cannot say anything about the customer service, because did not use it yet.

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.

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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