Rocket Languages Reviews

I hate the points and streaks function and you have provide no ability to switch off!

I am preferring the Pimsleur system far more.

Inconsistent and confusing !
The progression of difficulty in lessons is VERY problematic and not well though !
Sudden long chains of complex unknown words that you have to repeat during the gap which is often too short for long sentences even when you know them by heart.
Followed by obvious 2-word sentences you have seen and heard 5 times already.
Then back to a complex sentence filled with new words.
And not so much audio content in between.
Too expensive for that kind of inconsistency.

It's hard to accurately review Rocket Language Japanese, since the levels are so different in quality, but after 2+ years I believe that I can give you a very accurate impression of the first 2 levels, I hope, unless major changes has been made in 2019-2020 (I still haven't made it past level 2, and I haven't used the course since December 2019).

Level 1 is AMAZING! 5 stars! I couldn't recommend it more!
True story: after doing the first section, it helped me land a job in Japan!
I had to do an interview in Japanese via Skype (I needed conversational Japanese for the position), and several of the Q&A was straight of Rocket Languages Japanese Level 1!! I honestly felt that I only had basic Japanese, but the interviewer considered my level to be conversational Japanese and I landed the position!

Level 2 is such a disappointment! The conversations are wayyyy too fast compared to Level 1, and the target language is not anywhere near as useful for everyday living in Japan, I find. Keigo should be taught at a much later stage, and instead it would be much more useful to teach colloquial Japanese that you can actually use with your friends! When you use the masu form that is mainly used in the course, your friends will say: "Yeah...

Read More

I hate to write this, but the English guide's strange midcentury Boston brahmin accent is so distracting that I cannot hear the Korean being spoken. Aside from the strange English, the phrases used for study are very long and not broken up into memorizable parts, and there is no option to not include the very long and unnecessary "extra vocab" from the audio in the flashcards and other study.
Overall this seems to be teaching canned phrases to be stored in short-term memory, rather than starting out small and forming a true understanding of the language for long-term learning. This might be good if you're visiting Korea for a short period and need to parrot some emergency phrases, but I may have to look elsewhere to actually learn to understand Korean. Pretty disappointed in how much money I spent.

I have found Rocket Japanese to be useful, and frustrating in about equal measures. The voice-recognition is a great idea in helping perfect your pronunciation. Unfortunately I find that about 20% of the time (I haven't kept a count, this is a rough estimate) it simply doesn't work. Either your phrase is not recognised, or deemed incorrect. As a beginner, not knowing if it is you, or the software that is the problem can be insanely frustrating. It doesn't appear to be the longer sentences that suffer from this. The very first sounds we are asked to repeat are riddled with examples. After 3 months it still tells me I can't pronounce 'ka'.
I have finally been prompted to write this because the system tells me I cannot pronounce 'America jin' correctly. Clearly this is an almost native sound to an English speaker, but I mimic the example exactly to no avail. I can forgive these issues, although there are other minor complaints. I have also reported some mistakes in the text, but they remain unchanged. Personally I find that the audio lessons are rather childish, and would be happier if we just got on with the lesson, but I recognise that might just be me being grumpy.

Read More

It is such a shame. Rocket has the potential to be really good, but lack of attention to detail and poor explanations mean that it fails to reach its potential.

I have almost finished my Rocket Korean course. I have benefited from it, but only because I have a Korean wife, who has been able to explain things that Rocket have left vague, not explained well or just got plain wrong. First, the good things. The reinforcement process (Flashcards, oral repetition and so on) is excellent and has helped things to stick in my mind. The voice recognition software is also pretty good. It is weak on short words of one or two syllables, but in general works well. The audio conversations and reinforcement within them are also decent. There are three big problems with Rocket, however. Firstly, it’s explanations of grammar are not very clear and sometimes contain errors. Secondly it illustrates concepts with sentences that are far too complex and contain sections which are not explained. This is incredibly frustrating, because it means that you end up rote learning a lot of phrases rather than learning how to construct your own sentences. Finally the reference material and structure is very weak.

Read More

I really like the tool and I that you can record your voice and compared to the native is the best function. I learned quite a lot of words but there is one big problem. The man speaks with a Rio De Janeiro accent. When I came to Sao paulo where my wife is from many people laughed at my strong accent and I realized I have gotten a really strong Rio De Janeiro accent which does not seem like the best of accents xD.

I wanted to have a Sao paulo accent and after knowing this fact I could not continue as the portuguese accent was not the one I was looking for. So I love the service but the audio is just not what I am looking for making it not usable.

Very disappointed. I bought this primarily for verbal skills & to be confident to talk the language. The voice recognition software for all devices is dreadful. It is woefully inadequate & buggy.
Aside there aren't any repeat reinforcements in the lessons & each one is loaded with ‘additional’ vocabulary which confuses the core lesson.

Seeing all the rave reviews makes me wonder if there's something wrong with me. I am not a linguistic novice; I am a native speaker of English but a fluent speaker of Korean, I majored in linguistics in graduate school, and I've studied several languages both in university classes and on my own. But I'm having a hard time making any progress in Rocket Chinese. Eleven- or twelve-morpheme sentences are just too long for a beginner in the language. And while Lin Ping's spoken examples are very clear and easy to understand, David always sounds like his mouth is full of food and everything runs together. (I'm sure his Chinese is very good, but Chinese itself tends to sound like that to start with. It's just really frustrating.)

I bought the complete premium course and am wondering if I made a terrible decision.

I've been using the Rocket Spanish for 53 days, and while it has some good points, it's not an effective program for learning Spanish. The co-host, Mauricio, does not speak clearly enough for a beginner to understand, and there are some times when he is clearly not saying the sentence that is on the screen. I might recommend this program for business travelers, since that is mainly what the lessons are about (getting a hotel, booking a flight, ordering in a restaurant), but even then, you won't become fluent. You will just learn what you need to know to get around in that country. I've just requested a refund.