Rocket Languages Reviews

An interesting language program but has problems playing in the company's recommended browser " Chrome ", keeps crashing used different laptops using Windows 7, Vista, and Windows 10 whilst using " Chrome ". Ended up doing a lot of work on a laptop running Windows XP using
" Firefox " avoiding " Chrome " as the system is too ancient for " Google " developers of " Chrome ". The constant crashes of " Chrome " disheartened me , after doing the same work three times run out of free time to get the 400 points that is recommended for daily target. That said if the constant crashes are eliminated then it is a good program.

I have tried rosetta stone live mocha and berlitz. It is simple easy cost effective method of learning spanish. i have tried other software. This is great learning tool. i have tried arabic language course before. that was also good. I can learn on my pace flex schedule.

The review games are an awesome idea. The don't have the structure they need to help with the learning process. I would prefer the lessons to include more vocab and less history. I know the history is important but the language learning is what I'm here for.

I am a bilingual person (translator from English into French) trying to learn Japanese. I've been trying several methods books, on-line, etc., over several years. Even though this method is far more interesting and educational than Rosetta, I feel that it is lacking of grammatical points or explanations, so to be a complete learner, you need to complement it by another mean (books or apps). After saying that, I will still recommend this on-line method, since I believe it is one of the best today.
Improvements:
The testing system: it would be more educational to be testing more than 5 (Japanese 2) or 10 questions (Japanese 2), while the listen and writing, test you on over 30 questions.
Even though the voice recognition improve dramatically over the years, it is still sometimes difficult to use it, especially with long sentence in the Play role section. The system stops before I say half of the sentences. It works fine most of the time with single word.
The first audio is too long and have a lot of unnecessary moments. For example, why practicing to say a word or sentence when it is listed in the vocabulary section in which you can learn how to say it as well? Also, to be honest, Kenny's voice is a little annoying after a while.

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I am using Rocket Italian as a review to the Italian I studied "Molti anni fa" in college so that I can be more fluent and approachable when I travel. I like the pace and the ability to skip around. However, the American accent of Alex is distracting and there is too much spoken English. I can see if a beginner is trying to get traction it might be okay. I am looking forward to moving up into the later levels. Overall, hearing so much English and the English accent is distracting. There are also some grammar errors in the translations along the way. For the price, I would expect more flawless execution. However overall, I like the conversational approach and the ability to hop around to get what I need to progress.

Good for those who like to control the content of their learning rather than going in an order dictated to them. I like the email reminders to encourage return to learning. Clicking on phrases to hear the pronunciation is also very helpful, as is playing the games to test knowledge.

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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So far I find the recording of my voice/voice recognition extremely frustrating. I have used a headset, my airpods and nothing at all and it doesn't recognize what I saw half the time. Even easy words like ciao and sei. Everything else is ok so far, not totally user friendly. I will try it out longer and see how it goes. But, I strongly recommend working on the voice recognition. There are many products out there that work really well with this, such as Dragon my Nuance. Maybe use their software to recognize what people are saying.

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.

The courses itself are well structured and have intuitive user interface. I also like that you often repeat phrases in next lessons.
However the performance of the web site and its responsiveness is not always very good. I had few days when lessons hangs and I also see that while doing speaking exercises it is quite often that it will not catch the phrase I speak even after 2-3 attempts.