Rocket Languages Reviews

Bon, J'aime les langues et Rocket French m'a donné une bonne chance pour pratiquer la langue français. J'ai trouvé une bonne oppurtunite pour l'ecriture, la partie oral et l'écoute. Bien sûr j'ai besoin de pratiquer la conversation, je crois que la conversation est le chose plus importante, j'espère que Rocket French a un moyen pour fait la conversation entre éleves

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.

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).

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 need a lot more practice! Can't figure how to answer the flash card section. I will keep trying to figure it out! I will review again

Some of the settings and order are fine and I am learning relatively quickly. The problem is there are some errors with the sound files or miss spellings that are frustrating and some of the longer phrases earlier on are added to vocabulary but they are never broken down or explained so it is very hard to learn them.

While I am learning, I wouldn't use the prompted word, "awesome". The course relies heavily on voice recognition, which isn't entirely reliable. Also, there are a frustrating number of words or grammatical rules that appear in the practice phrases that weren't included in the lesson. Keeping a Google Translate window open helps with the vocabulary. I'm left to hope that the unexplained grammar will eventually be covered in a subsequent module...

I just started the advanced course and I find the conversation very difficult to follow. It is hard to
Understand because the speech is fast and slurred not clearly spoken. Especially when new words and phrases are used..
The first two courses don't prepare you well enough with verb conjugation either.

Rocket misses the mark in many ways. Teaching phrases without a literal translation is not helpful. Ideally, one should know what each word in the sentence is, so that one can then compose one's own sentences. Additionally, the speakers speak very quickly and one can't really tell how they are pronouncing the words in spite of having them spelled out in cyrillic. Also when teaching color names, why aren't' there colors on the screen, or at least on the flash cards? And when there are nouns, why not a picture of the object? I've been learning languages for many years, and I like some of Rocket Language's features, but I have to say that Pimsleur, does a much better job of teaching one to actually speak and understand the language, and they give literal translations and help one understand the context and syntax of words. But Pimsleur only teaches the audio, and they are way too expensive to only do that. Rocket Languages does offer voice comparison, but I have my doubts as to how good it really is at telling me how close I am to correct pronunciation. Rocket Languages is okay, but not the greatest. However, it is affordable. But, their customer service isn't very good.

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So the program is pretty decent. Using Rocket will definitely increase proficiency. The most frustrating part of the platform by far is the new voice recording system -it's extremely slow and very un-responsive. It slows down the whole learning process. Customer service is cumbersome process but based on the cost of the program, it's not fair to expect that much.