Rocket Languages Reviews

Rocket Italian has been super helpful for me. My boyfriend is Italian and this course allowed me to communicate in his native country with his family. There are some glitches such as sensitivity with the hear it, say it part of the course, and a bug with the certification, but they are really good about fixing things.

This is the most helpful app and course I've tried among all the other apps. The only glitch I found is the hear it, say it part where it does not recognize some of my inputs but overall, the app is great.

The training is very good with practical everyday phrases to learn and repeat whenever I have the time.
The voice recognition in the "hear it, say it" becomes either deaf or impaired of hearing even though the answers are correct, as the software refuses to recognise my pronunciation.

The interactive audio is excellent however I struggle with the writing component. I am not sure what would be the best way to learn written Chinese over the internet, but I know I struggle with the way it has been presented to me here. However I purchased this product to learn the spoken language which it is great to learn from.

The Rocket Chinese course is comprehensive and contains a good variety of tools. There are a couple negatives though. The main one is that the male voice actor's pronunciation is not very good. That's a huge drawback when you're trying to learn to pronounce a language correctly. Offline use on Android is fairly minimal. It's painful to enter pinyin for exercises that use it, for instance you can't just enter dan1cheng2, you need to find a way to enter dānchéng. Some odd vocabulary items are introduced early, like "go dutch" or "seat belts". It would be nice to have some additional drills and reading material. Overall though, if they could replace the male voice (or he could improve his pronunciation and cadence) it would be a very good course. (I haven't used their customer service so I'm giving the benefit of the doubt with 5 stars.)

Well designed course that combines visual, audio, written, quizzes, flash cards and reminders along with a little humour. It's a very well designed program.

The online computer version has an advantage. It records your spoken phrases so you can play them back to compare pronunciation with the native speaker. This is great! The iPhone version lacks that feature. It grades your spoken response but you can't hear your spoken response.

Overall, I'm very impressed with the educational design and the usefulness of Rocket Chinese. Very well done! I used both the computer and my iPhone for practice. I like both versions. It's the best language learning course I've seen, by far.

I took a regular class of Japanese for 12 weeks .It was very difficult. It was mostly grammar and Writing skills. By supplementing it with Rocket Japanese I was able to say practical sentences for many situations and develop some fluency. I was so happy with my 1st language, I added Rocket Arabic. It is very challenging but with Rocket I feel I am making slow steary progress pronouncing it correctly.

I bought the French language version. Very good. I don't know about the other courses but I have a couple of reasons for not giving it a 5 star rating: 1. The pronunciation of the female speaker in the early lessons is often bad. She has a habit of not pronouncing the nasal "n" in the middle of words or in liaison word combinations. Consequently I use Google translate to learn and practice the pronunciation of these words. Google has a fast and slow mode which is also helpful but no male speaker option. Forvo pronunciation does but is limited in available styles. The best I've found is Acapela which has a choice of male, female, France French, Belgium French, Canadian French, emotive, flat, etc, but no speed option. The good thing is that the voice recognition system does recognize the pronunciation I use from Google etc. If I copy the speaker in the Rocket Language course when she uses words with "n" in the middle ( e.g. vingt, prendre, or combinations like "pas inquitez") it doesn't recognize them. NOTE, I am a native English speaker fluent in Chinese and Japanese. I have had many hours in language labs learning unfamiliar sounds.

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The lessons are extremely thorough and I appreciate it even though they are challenging at times. Which is a good thing. I have tried other methods of learning Spanish and so far am really liking Rocket Languages.

So far (I am only on Lesson 1.3) the experience is good. The conversation is applicable to everyday life - and I am looking forward to using these phrases, as they stick in my head and on my tongue, next week on a business trip to Paris. I need to keep practicing saying the phrases, and comparing my pronunciation and word rhythm with the recordings.