Rocket Chinese Reviews
Find out what actual users have to say about our courses through their Rocket Chinese reviews.
I'm in the early process of learning, so far it has been a good experience. I plan to continue with Rocket Languages fora long time to come.
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 liked using the program during the 6-day trial, but I am a little upset. I started to purchase the premium package, but I changed my mind. I closed the purchase window before finalizing the purchase. However, Rocket Languages billed my credit card anyway. Now I will have to dispute this as an unauthorized charge.
The record with voice recognition grading really helps to get your pronunciation right, and the playback of your voice really helps you find out why you did get the grade you expected. These tools give a strong incentive to practice speaking, and have helped me to progress faster. The downside is that these tools are only practically useful on PC and not useful on Android because of speed and different limited web page. (I cannot speak for Apple versions).
I would give the course 5 stars if all features were available on all platforms.
On android viewing the website, speech recognition is so much slower to respond, and much less accurate, so the time delays become frustrating - it is very dependent on internet and wireless speed. The key thing android misses is it that it has no ability to play back what you said (so that you can hear and correct your own mistakes). From the forum comments this appears to have been missing for 2 years or more, and I think Rocket Languages should make playback of your own voice a priority fix for android users.
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.)
Alright, so I have been using Rocket Chinese for about a year now. I was attracted mostly by the price and the amount of features involved. I was not about the drop hundreds of dollars on Rosetta's Stone or Pimsleur, but I did want quality learning. There are hundreds of ways to learn Mandarin for free on the internet. I realize that. But I needed a place that could provide grammatical support, and have comprehensive lessons that taught a higher level of understanding to the language. Here is what I got:
-Good entertaining lessons
-Motivation
-An overall look at the language
-Chinese culture
And here are the things that I have noticed need improvement
-Despite the recent edits to the "Hear it, Speak it" I definitely think that it can be fixed up even more
-The point system can be more comprehensive for example someone that practices every day, reviewing old lessons will never get the same credit as someone who just puts random answers for quizzes, answers BS for blog posts. I know the end goal is to learn the language and these people wont be doing that but you get the idea
-Chinese writing section I think could definitely use some improvements, and a way of testing yourself to learn the characters.
I have not yet progressed very far into the course, but for as far as I have gone, Rocket compares favorably with Pimsleur courses I have used. I like the available transcripts and computer material. Being able to actually see the words helps a great deal in getting the pronunciation down faster correctly. The recordings are a little too chatty and waste a bit of time better devoted to the language itself. I look forward to your Russian course.
I have so many things to say about Rocket Chinese I don't know where to start. How about the beginning...
I have been interested in learning Chinese for a year now. I have five programs, three I obtained for free and two I paid for. Of the three I found for free, one came from my local library, I didn't feel bad about making a copy because they are public domain, two I downloaded from the Internet and there was no charge.
They are all good programs, I know because I am very critical and skeptical due to the numbers of programs available, I felt I could go broke trying to find a good teaching program for learning Chinese. Of the two programs that I bought one was from a University and one is the Rocket Chinese language course.
The one from the University is good, but I expected much more form a University language course and it is no where near as comprehensive as Rocket Chinese, but to keep things honest, I paid less for the University course.
Rocket Chinese has a lot of interesting features, but some don't seem to work as intended. I tried many times to do the testing...but somehow, it never registers when I do the speaking, although the microphone displays the profile it should have...lately the vocabulary did not seem to register eiter anymore when I put words into it.
Just starting out but seems to have very good interaction and structure. Particularly like the voice recognition so you can have a, somewhat, proper conversation.