Rocket Languages Reviews

I like the practicality of starting with useful daily conversations in Spanish, as opposed to a heavy dose of grammar and vocabulary memorization. I like the breakdown of phrases into their individual parts and the repetition. The pauses between repeated phrases allow ample time to practice mimicking the speakers aloud. Then checking my pronunciation against theirs. As a lifelong educator myself, I like the 'layered' approach--with one conversation building on the previous conversation and then continuing. This IS an effective way to learn pretty much anything! Good job Rocket Spanish. :)

I think the overall teaching style of this program is pretty great, but the execution is not there yet.

The major shortcoming is the male's pronunciation. I am a complete beginner to studying Chinese, but it's incredibly obvious his pronunciation is absolutely awful. During the conversations, I can understand the female perfectly fine, but I still can't understand the male speaker well even after studying the lesson. I also worry that I may pick up bad habits myself even listening to his speech.

Another minor drawback is that I do not believe there is a way to zoom in or make the characters larger on the mobile app, which is unfortunate since I tend to study these lessons while exercising on an elliptical or other cardio machine, so the phone is a fair distance away from my eyes.

A feature I wish they would add in the future is increased robustness of the conversations. Instead of teaching us exactly one perfectly scripted conversation, teach us variations. Most of the time there are a handful of different ways someone could say the same thing, so even if the conversation is relatively simple in content, learning just one specific tightly scripted conversation is going to be pretty useless once you step out into the real world.

Overall, Rocket Chinese is founded on good ideas and has solid potential, I hope it will strive to improve and live up to the potential I see.

Still learning about how to use the app. It seems to work well on my Android phone, and voice recognition does not work on my iPad. I wish I could explore more alternate words and phrases that seem commonly used...according toSpanish speakers I attempt to engage.

I have been using Duolingo because it's free, but it's not meeting my needs. I like that Rocket Spanish helps with my pronunciation, which Duolingo did not. I had a coupon so I'm willing to give Rocket Spanish a try for 60 days! Plus, I already had the headphones with a mic so why not??

Love everything so far, but I’ve noticed that you are changing the voice actors with the audio files. In my opinion, I’d prefer the original combination of the English Kenny and the ‘Osaka’ kansai-jin Sayaka...especially Sayaka, whose accent, in both nihongo-ga and eigo-ga is very helpful in terms of realistic Japanese phonetics. The new Sayaka is less ‘endearing’ and the new Kenny-san has perhaps a too refined Kanto-style accent.

Lesson 1.7 is about to do me in. I simply cannot understand it when they're saying such long sentences and speaking so rapidly. Then again, I got made fun of once in the 90's Mexico when I said cuatro because I said it so slowly. I'm from the South. I speak English slowly and damned sure can't speak Spanish that fast. I also can't remember all those words and phrases. There were a lot of them in this lesson!

I have enjoyed and gotten a lot from the program. I have recommended it to friends which is the highest compliment. We have purchased in Mexico and make frequent trips. Each trip my comprehension and conversational Spanish improves significantly.

I have tried every audio software and physical classes to learn languages; Rocket is the first course I have actually enjoyed and stuck to! The content is very in depth and engaging; I particularly like how they explain how the language works culturally. As I am living in Italy I found this very useful. It is the most interactive software and the various tool really make you feel like you are making progress while making it easy to memorise.

Rocket French is so helpful. It is a fun easy way to learn French. I always want to do it! It is the best way to learn French I have ever seen. It may be expensive but it is worth it!

I have liked the program so far but here are my main criticisms:
First, the pacing. I wouldn't say I like having 5 audio lessons consecutively and then 5 language and culture lessons in a row. I prefer to have one audio and one language and culture lesson each time. I also wish these two types of lessons were more related and interconnected. they seem so disjointed and irrelevant right now.
I also wish that there was some sort of spaced repetition feature for reviewing previously learned vocabulary and materials. Therefore I have to manually make flashcards in another program (Anki) for this which is a little cumbersome than having them readily available.
I would like to see some new features for exercising the learned vocabulary and grammar instead of just repeating the limited number of sentences in each lesson and requiring the students to form and come up with new sentences.