Rocket Japanese Reviews
Find out what actual users have to say about our courses through their Rocket Japanese reviews.
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.
Response from Rocket Languages
Response from Rocket Languages: Hi Andrew, thanks for the detailed feedback. Unfortunately, very short words tend not to work very well with voice recognition as they don't have a lot of context. With regards the lessons themselves, we are in the process of completely redoing the Language & Culture lessons and hope to have those up in the next couple of months. Unfortunately, the pandemic has put a halt to a lot of our activities.
Rocket languages really gave me the tools to succeed with my new language. It brought me to a level where I was finally comfortable speaking with native speakers and I was able to take off on my own after that. I highly recommend Rocket Languages to all my friends trying to learn a new language. Learning with this system felt practically effortless.
TL:DR -These courses are worth bothering with and a fair deal but don't expect perfection or a miracles.
This was sold to me (by external reviews) as being better than Rosetta stone and the current market leader in comprehensive language learning for self study, and yeah it is better and may be the best all around, but its still far from perfect. There are other products that are distinctly better for certain aspects of Japanese study, but this one is a good all-rounder.
It is very much like a by the book language study course that you would get in a generic language school.
Its not ground breaking, but its very solid and should successfully teach any diligent student some extent of their target language.
Given that you get hundreds of hours of lessons that you can do at your own pace I think the price is great value but I can't quite give 5 stars because there are some flaws in the product and service.
Unlike many free apps you aren't limited to 5 or 10 mins per day which means that the system can take its time to teach you slowly and methodically, and that if you have a lot of free time (and almost everybody does at the time of writing mid-April 2020) then you can do an hour or more everyday.
Response from Rocket Languages
Response from Rocket Languages: Hi Sean - Thanks for submitting a review. Some interesting observations in there! I thought that I would comment on a couple of things;
This year Rocket Japanese is scheduled to have a total review of the course content. We realize that there are some issues and are moving to address those.
With regards the romanization toggle; this seems to be working. Can you please provide screenshots to customer support of where it doesn't seem to be working?
There was an issue with the voice recognition difficulty in that you had to refresh the page for the change to take effect. That has now been rectified, so it should just work.
And we will look into the review system as well. In fact we are re-factoring the entire members area into a new code base, so it's timely to look at some aspects that haven't been looked at for a while. The new version is due out later in the year.
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.
Response from Rocket Languages
Hi Richard, I would like to thank you for taking the time to provide us with your feedback on the Rocket Japanese course. Your review is greatly appreciated. We are happy to know that you enjoyed Level 1 of the course. However, we're sorry to hear that the audio lessons in Level 2 did not meet your expectations. I have already passed your feedback on to our Rocket Japanese team, who will take it into consideration while working on future course updates. Thank you again for your valuable feedback, and we wish you all the best with your Japanese language learning!
I agree with several reviewers that the narrator, Sarah is possibly the most monotone person on the planet. I mean, she gives Ben Stein a run for his money. The product idea is great and when it's working properly, it's the best on the market. Unfortunately, I can't gove it five or even four stars as it's just too buggy (sometimes the audio doesn't play or double plays - sounds like there are two Sayakas or Kennys competing for my attention - or the mic doesn't work at times). Hopefully, those are fixed soon!
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 to 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...
Response from Rocket Languages
Response from Rocket Languages: Hi Snowah - We are in fact starting on a complete revamp of Rocket Japanese very shortly! All new lessons will be available to existing members for free.
I used to really enjoy these lessons (taking the Japanese course). The banter between tutors Sayaka and the original Kenny made lessons enjoyable and fun. Since I had returned from my trip to Japan I had taken a short break from practicing, but I recently jumped back on only to learn that the original audio lessons have been replaced with a super boring monotoned narrator. While the program did initially help me impress all of my Japanese friends, it no longer feels like I have lifelike tutors to encourage me to keep up my studies, just a robot with choppy cut and paste vocabulary being lectured at me. The enthusiasm of the lessons is gone and sadly so is mine with learning from this program.
Response from Rocket Languages
Response from Rocket Languages: Hi Christopher - We are sorry that you feel that way. The decision was made to replace the non-native speaker (Kenny's) parts with a native speaker. The decision basically came down to answering "what provides the best and most authentic learning experience for the majority of learners?". While Kenny has been a big part of Rocket Japanese we just thought that his accent compromised the voice recognition functionality.
I am hoping that within a year of this program I will be able to Speak Japanese to my co workers. Its much better than Rosetta Stone. I just wish this program explained at very beginning why certain words are used in the sentence like ga, wa, no, imasu, desu and masu so it can be applied instead of just memorized.
Response from Rocket Languages
Response from Rocket Languages: We agree! There is a new lesson on this topic being created. It will be added to the course soon!
The voice recognition works pretty well. It struggles with very short sounds, but overall very good. I've used other programs that ask you to speak the answers, but the pronunciation analysis makes me try much harder to say each response out loud.
The romaji is good for beginners, but already know hiragana and katakana, so the romaji is very distracting. I wish there was an option to turn off romaji so I can practice reading.
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Response from Rocket Languages
Response from Rocket Languages: The romanized version of the phrases can be toggled on/off under your profile.--
Nice conversation planned especially for beginner level .