Rocket Languages Reviews

Your program is fine and efficient. Nevertheless the dialogues are a little boring ("Beijing seems to be a big city" , well, who doesn't know it?) and there is a BIG mistake in lesson 5.5 Places worth checking out in Beijing (the quizz) : the Great Wall of China CANNOT be seem from the moon ! Check it if you don't believe me. It's a myth !!!

The package is very well organized and well-planned, but I find it confusing. After completing Duolingo and Santamaria's Synergy Spanish, I'm not finding my proper level in Rocket Spanish and the system doesn't let me move ahead. The first third seems to me not useful to someone who is at the early intermediate stage, and I can't find a way to get into the second level. Instead, I keep getting just the intro material, which I already know. Even at the intro level, some problems jump out at me, such as the sudden addition of past tenses, when presumably the beginner doesn't know the present tense yet.

At first, I was able to record, but that suddenly quit on me, and now I can't. It doesn't matter too much, since I was getting 100% every time on my accent. I will try to manage without that feature. Headphones wouldn't help, since I can hear fine; I just can't record. I would like to advance, but don't see it happening.

Probably would've been helpful if I planned to visit Spain I was look ing for more every day con versation less about the continents / oceans some thing more that woul help full I every day conversations I live&work in a spanish speaking environment and woul of appreciated more phrases I'd say the course as is was n't for me

Some what disappointed:-:

I was happy with Rocket French in the beginning but as I am now in lesson 6 I find it extremely frustrating. I cannot remember 2-3 phrases and then say them quickly enough. I am constantly being cut off in mid sentence, and no I haven't paused, and the voice recognition is not very good.

I like the idea of the course, but I find it too cumbersome to use on a regular basis. Firstly, I practice at home in the evenings and it is disruptive for me to be speaking aloud continuously. Half the time this feature does not work for me, likely because I have slow internet. It also absolutely cannot understand me when I say the word "enchilada" even though I am 99% sure I am pronouncing it correctly. Secondly, the rating system is really annoying and I do not understand it at all. I would like to be able to run through lessons without having to click on a rating (I also have yet to figure out what "so so" and "good" mean). Clicking a rating after every single answer makes me take my hand off of the keyboard to reach the mouse to click, when it would be much quicker and simpler to be able to just hit 'enter' to go to the next phrase or word. This is especially annoying during the typing practice, which also requires the use of a virtual keyboard to type special characters. There should be keyboard shortcuts for these, it takes an inordinate amount of time to find the characters and select the right one for very short words.

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I like the interaction in the 'Play it' section but there are problems;

1. The programme frequently states that it has not heard my reply - despite that when I press playback my reply is very clearly there - this is very frustrating and time consuming.

2. The programme makes no allowance for a beginner taking time making a reply which inevitably takes a lot longer than a fluent speaker would take - this again is very frustrating and prevents making best use of the programme.

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 have been using the program for about a month and a half now and I have found it somewhat useful. My level is above that of a new beginner but not quite yet intermediate. My concerns about the program, starting with the idea that most people want what will be most useful i.e. picking up useful spoken language for travel, is that particularly when testing, the program expects your responses to be almost in the same order as their introduction. If the expected answer starts with Tu and you use the Vous form, you are marked as incorrect. The program should note what form is wanted. A "hint" function also would be nice to help someone with responses as learning, not just simple memorization, is the goal. The program also occasionally makes some unexpected detours from what is useful. For example, one lesson moved from general travel issues to a flight of fancy to go skiing. I did not find a lot of useful information in that lesson. Finally, today I took a test which contained a large number of questions involving the "passe simple". The last question on the test asked how much one would expect to hear the passe simple and the correct answer was "almost never". So, I feel a lot of time was wasted that could have been better spent elsewhere. I hope these comments are considered helpful. There are good things here but a few tweaks would make it much better.

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.

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