New Release of Rocket Languages on Desktop

Bonjour tout le monde ! Hi everyone!

Fantastic news! As part of our drive to stay the gold standard of language courses, earlier today we released a new desktop version of Rocket Languages.

For us, being the gold standard means that we are constantly looking at ways to improve the quality, comprehensiveness, and efficacy of our courses, and we think this latest release delivers just that!

This new version has significant design changes, which you should be able to see and use automatically (or use CTRL + F5 to refresh your (Chrome) browser).

So, what are the major changes?

- The overall design has been fully updated and is more user-friendly.

- The “behind the scenes” performance has been upgraded to make things faster.
- The web accessibility has been improved for people with disabilities.
- The status of lesson activities is easier to determine at a glance (see below).
- The side navigation shows the amount of lessons within a Module (and the amount of completed lessons).
- The audio lesson player now has a new layout and a volume control!

And, of course, this update is 100% free to all members. So, please let us know what you think!

Best,

Jason Oxenham
Rocket Languages

Hello

Thanks for the updates. 

One problem I have noticed is when going through the Flashcards. If I hover over the Lit. in the right hand corner all I see is a single white line without any text. This does not happen in any of the other exercise sections. I am using a Chrome browser.

Hi ErolY - Update: We found the issue and fixed it!

Can you please let me know which lesson this happens in? It seems to be working fine on the lessons we checked. Also, have you tried a hard refresh (CTRL + F5) to get the page to fully reload?

The problem occured in the Level 1 Survival kit lesson “Drinks and Breakfast”.

I have reloaded the page in the browser and it all appears to be working fine now. I can see the text.

Thank you for your help.

The new format drops the program well below the “Gold Standard” you speak of. The ability to record your voice, replay it and have feedback on most of the exercises, vocab and roleplay has been lost. It is so much worse that I find it incredible that you can bring yourself to market the changes as improvements. I can only assume that there is a cost issue. I am really disappointed and feel I have been robbed of what was a really good learning tool. Please can I have the old format back!

Response from Jason: Hi Jim. The play back functionality is there. It has just moved!

Hi Jason,

Thanks for the work you've put in.

However, I agree with Jim above, in that I've often wanted to replay my own spoken answers to check how clear my pronunciation is (and to pick up mistakes that the voice recognition doesn't catch).

Is it possible to reinstate that?

UPDATE: I just noticed the little speaker sign after the script of my speech.  So I'll retract my above complaint!

I've just had another look and the option to hear your voice is available during role play, so it must be possible to have it available elsewhere. Fingers crossed!

Yes you are right Peter, voice replay is there for listening, speaking, vocab and role play. It is only composing kana and composing kanji where it is missing. All (almost) is forgiven!

Response from Jason: Hi Jim. We are looking into this for the Kana/Kanji activities.

It's there when logging in on a PC, but doesn't appear to be if you use the Android app.

Perhaps it will turn up later.  On peut espère ça !

Response from Jason: Hi Peter. The ability to be able to replay audio in the context that we use it has just been made available on Android (13+) and iOS. We hope to have this out in the next release of the mobile apps.

I don't think it has been available on the app anyway, which is why I never use my iPhone or iPad. I think it's something to do with how much they can cram into an app compared to the website.

So far, I like the design, so that's the form box ticked.  Functionally, there are enhancements, so tick for the function box.  Thanks as ever to the whole Rocket team for these regular - and free - upgrades.  It really adds value.

Response from Jason: Thanks Chris!

I just found a problem with the “update”, that makes me think: never change a running system.

I could not delete a highlighted “saved vocab” in a lesson.

It was highlighted, I could click on it, I could edit it, but I could not delete that “saved vocab” from my list of saved vocab, as I used to be able to in the old version.

Looks like a bug to me 

Response from Jason: Hi Armin. Well spotted. That is indeed a bug that will be fixed asap.

As for the changes: I'm not sure if I like them - actually, I don't.

Here is why: 

A design adjustment with less functions is not an improvement to me.

The buttons used to be nicely grouped together (exercsises), but now they are all over the place.

The playback button for the recording is now an “icon” of a speaker at the end of a sentense.

That is probably why some people didn't find it anymore.

This change does not make any sense to me.

It looks to me like an adjustment to make the desktop version match the mobile version, but it should be the other way around actually, or keep them different.

A mobile device and a desktop are used differently, so different designs actually make sense.

Another huge issue for me and a reduction of functionality we used to have: 

We used to be able to record ourself multiple times, compare with the native speaker, record again, compare again etc. to improve our prononciation.

Now we can only record ourself once in the reinforcement exercises.

No other course or app that I know of, offers that function.

Now Rocketlanguages doesn't offer it anymore either. It is a keyfeature to me that is now missing.

Another “reduction”: in the excercises, we have one choice less - now it's only “easy” or “hard” and nothing in between. 

This is “cute”, but with buttons all over the place and less functions.

Don't change a running system guys.

I'm with you ArminZ. You can record yourself multiple times during role play and vocab, but only once in listening and speaking and not at all in composing (kana and kanji). Why the difference and why the different layout? There doesn't seem to be a simple logical theme for the layout throughout the various parts of the program. It all seems very muddled - still usable but, but with reduced functionality.

Caglar: Look for the loudspeaker icon that appears after you have recorded your voice. It's not obvious!

I am doing the exercises now and I am completely frustrated, because I can only record myself one time, only one chance and no possibility to compare myself multiple times and improve my prononciation that way.

I don't understand why you take functions away? How is taking functions away supposed to improve your product? Sometimes less is more, but definately not in this case.

I am very disappointed with this change. 

I did not understand at all how voice recording functions now.

I see record voice button. After clicking it, I speak loudly to record my pronunciation. But nothing happens then. I do not see any tab or something like that to listen my recording.

This is really not good. 

Hi all - Firstly, thanks for the feedback! It's great to have such invested members. 

I have commented within some of your posts where I can add value and/or context.

The project team will be meeting to address the other areas of concern soon. Rest assured that we are taking your feedback seriously.

I would rather have you improve, but really improve on content instead of design.

Update content to how people actually speak today.
I had an interactive audio that still used the expression “comme si comme ça” which is totally outdated in spoken french. 

Another great addition would be:

Have the content from the native speakers speak clearly, so learners can understand, as it is done now.

And then have a version how people actually talk in every day life.

This would really also be something that other programs don't have - learning actually spoken french or other languages.

One more, I'm sorry, but I am finding more bugs.

Every time, I start the listening (and repeating) exercise again, it is set to “start recording automatically after the native speaker is finished” (something like that), allthough I turned that of multiple times.

Without closing the program, it is set back to automatic playback every time.

Hi Armin - There are projects in the pipeline to redo the audio lessons in several courses, including French. 

Thanks for the suggestion regarding the audio clarity. Note that there is the setting on desktop to slow down the tutors audio speed, which may help.

I can't seem to replicate the “Listening” issue that you have. It works as it should for me (on Chrome). What browser are you using?

Hi Jason. I'm very heartened by your responses, it is good to know you take our comments seriously. Thanks.

Hey Jason, I am using Chrome on a Windows computer.

Misunderstanding: I understand the tutors and don't need to slow down what they say.
My suggestion was, that they speak, like in a second or alternate version, how people actually speak in france, faster, dropping vowels, fusing words together.

That to learn to understand REAL spoken french, which is a challenge, I know.

Found something else, I am not sure about, cause I don't know this particular exercise in that lesson bevor the design changed.

In this writing exercise, the additional information was missing that the speaker (je) is supposed to be female, so one has to ad an additional “e” on “allé+e”.

Maybe a problem with data banks, or that information (fem) was missing before the design change as well.

Response from Jason: Hi Armin. It looks like this has always been the case for this phrase. I will look into what we can do here. 

Thank you Jason. It only needs one of those “Lit.” informations like
Lit.: I (female) went to Switzerland for one month

There are some more Informations missing on other “flashcards”. 
I will give them to the team via the feedback option.
Note: not trying to go on anyones nerves, but trying to help improve your product and our learning experience :-)

Congrats and I know change is always hard, but so far I enjoy the new formatting.  I definitely want you to keep trying to improve things, so thanks. One content improvement (which is also a good idea) is a stretch goal suggestion, but it would be nice if you could use AI somehow to accept answers in exercises that say the same thing, but in a  slightly different way. Like including a pronoun when the “correct” answer doesn't or the word order is slightly different, but both are acceptable. I know that will be hard, but just thinking out loud with you and hopefully happens as AI improves. There is already a website where you chat with the AI bot and in the feedback section it tells you whether you would be understood or not (if you didn't get it grammatically perfect), the grammatically correct way to say it (if you made a mistake) and sometimes a suggestion that while what you said was correct, a native speaker would more likely say it in a different way (that feature is super cool).

Response from Jason: Thanks for your feedback Scott. We have looked into AI for different aspects but right now it's not accurate enough in our linguists opinion. It is something we are watching though.

I love the “green but a red dot” in the exercises. I move on when I am green, but had to hunt for “less than perfect” in the past. This is definitely an improvement.  However, I don't like having no green on the module titles. Made it very simple to quickly move the mouse to the module I wanted and then the lesson. If all the lessons are green, you should turn the module title green. I do see the “7/8” or “8/8” but it just isn't as visual. Obviously not a deal breaker, but I know you like feedback.

We will look into this!

I like the Role Playing look, but the search function went away. I didn't use that a ton (within role play) but it was nice to have. LOVE the ability to eliminate every other word or to leave just English or just Spanish. 

Maybe you have this mixed up with the audio lesson? There never was a search option in the Role Play activities.

In all my quizzes that I have taken (in the past), it shows green, but then shows I scored 5 hard and 0 easy. That has to be an error that needs to be fixed. Just as a data point, when I re-took a quiz, it accurately reflected how many I got wrong or right.

Oops! Fixed!

Thanks for allowing us to use the flashcards English to Spanish or Spanish to English. I am a little concerned that you have to reset the deck to go the other way around. Both directions are important IMO. 

I see what you are saying but is deliberately that way, otherwise the amount of activities get out of hand (in our opinion).

Did the decks change? I noticed quite a few decks now have cards not reviewed yet (that I had previously reviewed).

Words/phrases have been added to certain lessons over time. With the old navigation/rating system you probably wouldn't know. Now (with the red dot for example) it is easier to see incomplete activities, and therefore these sorts of changes/edits.

I like the change to the forum (where you respond directly in the comment). Is that going to be the new norm when people ask grammar, culture, etc questions and the Rocket associated expert answers?

Ha! Probably not. I just did this because the thread was getting too long. The forum is on the list to be revamped as one of the next projects to make it more user-friendly.

FYI, the bug that you can't delete a saved vocab is not new. About 2 weeks ago I started using that feature and every once in a while I had one that wouldn't work. I found if I reloaded the page, it sometimes worked. It definitely worked (on the word it wouldn't delete) when I came back a day later.

A “Remove” button has been added back in!

The inability to record more than once is definitely a blunder. I re-recorded every single time I used Rocket Language. Listening to yourself as you say something vs listening to the recording is so different. That is how I worked on my accent. Definitely consider adding that back. Strangely as I have kept experimenting (trying to give you all the feedback at once), in the writing exercises I can record my voice as many times as I like. And I do appreciate you get to retry if it wasn't 100%, so I am guessing allowing us to multiple record shouldn't be too hard to add back.

We have reverted some of the activities so that they work more like they used to.

I definitely hate the elimination of “yellow”. I used green, yellow and red very differently. (got it, needs some work, needs a lot of work). It helped me target exercises that I needed to work on more.

I understand that but we saw most people only use the 2 options, and it aligns it with how the mobile apps work.

If you are re-doing Spanish recordings, stop using the female who is not part of the Role Playing. She speaks fast and slurs words together (I hear her a lot in Level 2). I get that it is more real world, but when you are trying to learn it is so frustrating. Even slowed down she is so hard to understand. I don't have that problem with any other people (in this software).

Yes, we hear you on that one (no pun intended)!

Hi all - We have heard you with regards to the way the activities function and have reverted back to the original functionality. If you come across any other oddities then please let us know!

Thank you, Jason, for listening to your costumers.

Besides listening and responding to us as costumers, I believe, that it's also benefitial for your product.

And thank you for the quick changes.

Question: is there a key command for the playback button of ones own recording?
it is:

p → playback of the tutor

r → record oneself

(they were not mentioned in the instrution for the exercise, but now they are again - cool)

l → for listening to oneself could be an option :-)

Kind regards

Armin

Response from Jason: Hi Armin. We would need to add that in. We will add it to the discussion list for development.

Thanks for the changes Jason. Much appreciated. Now I can get back to learning Japanese.

1. RE: Spanish 
2. 1. When I click on a Red Dot item it takes me to another menu titled ‘Activities’ where I have to select the Red Dot item again.
3. 2. Re: Speaking. There is no feedback on my recordings and there is no EASY/HARD to select so I can't select EASY to stop it showing up in the Need Work category.
4.  

RE: Module 1

Clicking on any of the link icons in 1.2 Making a Friend takes me to the Role Playing section. 

This is where the links take me.

I should mention that the icon links in the lesson area are all messed up, but the links in the left panel are all OK so far.

Hi Gadola - The system remembers where you were in any given lesson. So, when you go back to a lesson it drops you in at the last thing you were doing.

If you aren't getting speech recognition feedback on the Role Playing activity, then please check the Settings for that activity. There is a toggle box there that should be clicked “Enable Voice Recognition”.

If you have any further issues, I would suggest booking a call with our customer support team. You can do that at the top of the Dashboard page.

I like the Role Playing look, but the search function went away. I didn't use that a ton (within role play) but it was nice to have. LOVE the ability to eliminate every other word or to leave just English or just Spanish. 

Maybe you have this mixed up with the audio lesson? There never was a search option in the Role Play activities.

Yes, I mentally merge the two but you are correct. Searching the audio lesson is nice because you can jump straight to the section you are interested in (vs moving forward 10 seconds at a time).

I can't promise anything here, but we are looking into this. The search within the audio lesson transcript was used by very few people, hence removing it to reduce clutter. 

@Gadola, there were similar issues in the last version as well and I “complained” about it in the roll out thread and Jason said you shouldn't have links within links (as I recall), so I just lived with clicking twice.

Personally I have to say I don't like the changes.  Overall it just doesn't look as good.  You've made many of the fonts a lot smaller, a lot more wasted space and it's just not as readable.  It's annoying having to squint to read certain things now.  I'm doing Japanese, in the kanji lessons the characters are now much smaller and I have to zoom in to be able to identify them, which honestly is just annoying.  What is the reasoning behind this change?

I still recall the old design of the website years back, which was my favorite.  You changed it a few years ago and I didn't like it, but I got used to it.  Now you've changed it again and it's for the worse AGAIN.  And of course there's no option to change looks for the site, I'm stuck with new look.  That is really unfortunate.

Response from Jason: Hi Brion. That you have noticed a size difference seems a little odd as the script languages font is the same size as it was. However, it has now been bolded, so ironically perhaps the font is not as clear as when it was not bolded. I have put this back to our linguists for each language to comment on.

Its also just the general look… it just doesnt look as good, IMO.  It looks cheaper.  If there was a way to have the option to switch looks, like maybe to use older versions of the website… that would be the best feature!

I just noticed something else.  On mobile, I can no longer see points accumulated from the lesson.  It only seems to show up on desktop, on mobile those parts of the top menu just dont appear.  This is a very bad change.

I can see my daily points in the app. You have to back out of the lesson but I believe that is not new.

Jason, I remember what Rocket was like many years ago, this is another great improvement. Thanks!

The Rocket method of learning a language is and always has been what works for me.

Hi Meages - Thanks! We have come a long way from when we started 20+ years ago. It was all PDFs and MP3 files back then…

I just noticed green means you did all the exercises in a particular activity, even if you label them all red. it used to be yellow or red based on how many yellow or red you had. I think that is a much better system. The red dot was a wonderful addition, but activities with only a few green should not be green..

Response from Jason: Hi Scott. The previous system was not very intuitive as to how it worked. I am sure people figured it out over time but for new users it was an issue. So, the current version works in a clearer way (in our opinion), however, I get what you are saying with respect to the old color system. We will add it to the list of things to be looked at!

Re: Reinforcement activities -

As mentioned above, I don't think that reducing the possibilities to two (right or wrong) rather than three, as before, is an improvement. 

There can be phrases that you class as virtually correct, but with a slight error that you would like to iron out, which I used to score as 2 (rather than 3 for wrong).

I've also noticed that while doing these activities, you no longer get the running total of answers that you marked in each category. Could this be reinstated?

Response from Jason: Hi Peter. We are looking into the running total aspect you mention. As previously mentioned, very few people were using the middle option when rating phrases, so it's unlikely that will come back.

When I look at the exercises I can see how many of green or red I have. I have to be inside the exercise though and I can’t remember if you could see how many of each you had from a higher level than inside the exercise. Similar to all exercises being green no matter how many reds you had.

Can't see these numbers, even while doing the exercise.

Screen shot:

Answered 6 out of 48, but no indication of how many classed as easy or hard.

Peter - I think you may find a solution under; Profile, untick ‘hide leaderboard and points widget’.  If not, ignore this! Chris

Edit: I now see that it's not the fix you need. 

Hi Chris - Had a look at the profile and the box is already unticked. Tried ticking it and it made no difference, so reverted to unticked.

Thanks for trying, anyway.

Hopefully Jason will pop in & confirm whether it's vanished or not.

For me the most important improvement was the adding being able to check my pronunciation on words I found difficult doing the exercises.  For the most part I like all the improvments I have used over the past week.

I see it but in the list of activities but not the exercises themselves.

Was the test that used to be in tools for after you completed each chapter in a level removed in this update?

Hi Melissa - The Rocket Certification tests are still there (Tools > Rocket Certification)

Hi Peter/Scott - The count of “Easy”/"Hard" phrases within the activity has been added back in. That was our oversight!

Please bring back the Role Playing feature that allows the playback of the entire conversation with my recorded voice playing the the role of one of the characters.  Now,  I  have to click on each response individually.