Rocket Russian Reviews

Good luck unsubscribing! Still paying for no reasons!

The customer service is completely non existent. I have tried a few language courses over the years and this is by far the worst. It would be helpful to get a response but even that basic service eludes this company. The product offered might be useful if you could only get to it. Finding answers is like pulling your own teeth out. The company offers to learn a language fast ........yeah ok but it takes three days of waiting for.......... Nothing no response. Disgusting

Note from Rocket Languages: Hi Nicholas, thanks for your feedback. We are very sorry to hear you aren't happy with our courses. Our Customer Support Team has sent you a follow-up message to solve any issues you might have. All the best with your language learning! Your Rocket Languages Team

Very good set up and structure. However, my main complaint is that the conversations never really got increasingly complicated. Additionally, they did not include too wide a range of vocabulary. The audio is great for learning pronunciation but I feel like I spent a lot of time and did not learn as much as I could have say, through duolingo which is free. I would only recommend this program to people who have never studied a language before because it goes slow enough that it may be beneficial to get over the initial fears of learning a language. However, for people such as myself with a more developed linguistic background, I felt as if the dialogues did not advance very much and that I did not really leave learning as much as I could have if I spent the same amount of time with other resources.

I feel as if Rocket Languages needs to drastically alter the content of the dialogues to better suit them for "intuitive" grammar and vocabulary acquisition. That being said, the main structuring of the program I found to be fantastic and the native audio files also were superb.

Rocket misses the mark in many ways. Teaching phrases without a literal translation is not helpful. Ideally, one should know what each word in the sentence is, so that one can then compose one's own sentences. Additionally, the speakers speak very quickly and one can't really tell how they are pronouncing the words in spite of having them spelled out in cyrillic. Also when teaching color names, why aren't' there colors on the screen, or at least on the flash cards? And when there are nouns, why not a picture of the object? I've been learning languages for many years, and I like some of Rocket Language's features, but I have to say that Pimsleur, does a much better job of teaching one to actually speak and understand the language, and they give literal translations and help one understand the context and syntax of words. But Pimsleur only teaches the audio, and they are way too expensive to only do that. Rocket Languages does offer voice comparison, but I have my doubts as to how good it really is at telling me how close I am to correct pronunciation. Rocket Languages is okay, but not the greatest. However, it is affordable. But, their customer service isn't very good.

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Not truly rating yet, Really, I just started it. Only on lesson 1.1. Not sufficient to judge. Using this along with other sources, Penguin book, Living languages CDs and Duolingo and Master Russian online, plus a few other lesser sources. Plus I'm already familiar with the Cyrillic alphabet as I used it in the Air Force back in 1962-4. I'm 76 now and not in a hurry as I have no place to use Russian, just keeping the brain active. Thus most of the vocabulary and some of the theory of lessons 1.1 and 1.2, I already am already familiar with from the other sources. Each course also has differing additional vocabulary. Having said that, I do like being able to hear and mimic the pronunciations and working through the exercises to help remember the vocabulary. It is impossible to rate a program so soon. I would prefer to do my rating after a month or so when I really know what to rate. Stay tuned.

One major flaw, which is very frustrating. That is the speech recognition software is of poor quality. I do not know why this was not pretested better. But when saying the same words the same way results in a much higher score there has to be a problem. I listen to my voice played back, and it sounds much more like the Russian speaker's voice than the guess printed by the software. Often with time and no changes necessary it will register 100%. But often it will keep on asking for a repeat. It becomes very tedious. Otherwise the package is well designed, with a grammar emphasis which is necessary but often missing from other packages. So using this package I know why and how I am making a mistake. I have used another package in conjunction with this, but the other package is not sufficient by its own because although memory of the language improves, better understanding of the language is very slow. Rocket Russian helps this.

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.

Rocket Russian was launched only yesterday. It is perfectly functioning. Clear audio voices in Russian. The lessons include diferent ways of learning and testing your language skills. You get a little cyrillic keybord on screen for writing in cyrillic Russian, rather then phonetic roman writing. This is a usefull tool for getting used to cyrillic writing and learning the vocabulary in cyrillic alphabet.

The overriding problem with Rocket Languages is the faulty audio system. I own a MacBook Air 2013 computer for which the audio is excellent for all programs except this one.

Leaderboard and badges contribute to a more positive learning experience.

Your program coordinates well with Rosetta Stone and Pimsleur. Each of the three offers something special.
Rosetta Stone covers grammar in an incremental, methodical manner - offering extremely valuable practice
exercises on a whole host of subject matter and syntactical patterns. Rocket Language is a good follow-on to
Rosetta Stone and Pimsluer and offers effective reinforcement of both types of learning. For some languages,
Rocket Language sentences are overly complex if introduced too soon. They are challenging to master.

Big fan of the product, especially the multi-device experience. The application does a nice job of staying in sync, so I can switch over to my mobile when on the go in any spare time and continue my learning.

The feedback loop (recording, confirming, listening) has prove very helpful with my pronunciation. This is especially important for me as my wife and her church are all Native Russian Speakers.