Rocket Languages Reviews

Course #1's audio lessons were really excellent. The timing of the dialogue/repeat sections is spot on, the native speakers have very clear accents, and you learn a lot quite quickly. It is easy to put them on in the background and make several additional passes through the material to cement the teachings. I found the accompanying grammar lessons to be difficult to retain in the 'mostly text' format, and they often don't follow along with where you are in the audio lessons at all.

Course #2 is somewhat the opposite. The native speakers (and host) all have distinct accents, the dialogue timing is a mess, and the content is all over the place. One minute you're basically redo-ing a lesson from Course #1, and the next you're totally lost when everything switches to 'casual' speech, which you've had almost no exposure to thus far. Alternately, the grammar courses are now structured to expound upon specific parts of the audio, which is an improvement.

I was VERY happy with Course #1 overall, but I am soured on the audio portion of Course #2. When the dialogue-repeat sections sometimes go word-by-word, but give you 10 seconds to speak, it becomes very difficult to learn the line in entirety.

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Learning languages is really nice here; it sticks. Reciting the vocabulary and having it "graded" is really helpful for pronunciation. The "Play It!" portion is extremely helpful when it comes to being able to speak the language on cue. And when you're learning Russian, like me, or a language with a different writing system, "Write It!" can be frustrating and challenging yet extremely beneficial.

Voice Recognition is poor.
Especially small words & words starting with letter "S" !!

The learning is okay, but for students I think it would be more fun for them if there were more game-like qualities. Not so much it turns into a video game, but just enough to make students have fun during it.

I defenitely need more experience because speaking, understand and to write in Arabic is not easy.

I enjoy the course work and information so far. The voice voice recognition sucks. Had a French speaking friend speak as a test and she had the same experience. If this program tells a woman from Montreal that she's wrong or can't register her speech, then it just frustrates the learner and makes for a bad design.

I have not been using this long enough to write a review. I have a question out there and am waiting for the answer.

It may be just because I'm early in the lessons (lesson 1 still) but there seems to be a lot of English in the audio portions and not much of me practicing Italian. Also, the dialoguie is a bit "cutesy". Finally, I find the on-going transcript to be very distracting. Seeing the dialog spelled out detracts from my having to recall the Italian words and phrases. Maybe this will get better as I get deeper into the course.

So far I find the recording of my voice/voice recognition extremely frustrating. I have used a headset, my airpods and nothing at all and it doesn't recognize what I saw half the time. Even easy words like ciao and sei. Everything else is ok so far, not totally user friendly. I will try it out longer and see how it goes. But, I strongly recommend working on the voice recognition. There are many products out there that work really well with this, such as Dragon my Nuance. Maybe use their software to recognize what people are saying.

I really don't need to hear Amy's terrible American tourist accent, and I don't know why she shows up in the entire Level 1. I hope they replace her and re-do the audios again someday. Other than that, it's a great course.