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 redoing 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!