Find out what actual users have to say about our courses through their Rocket Languages reviews.
Good but it would be better if you had more help with the pronunciation of the Mandarin words. I know I can listen to your recording and mine but I can’t seem to figure out how to fix my pronunciation to match what is taught
The accent is laughable. As in, my spanish friends couldn't stop laughing. It's Mexican spanish, in a bad accent. The plays and lessons are mired in stereotypes, sexist, and awful. As far as actually learning Spanish goes, I'm struggling on with it, but I can't say it's really helped so far. Hopefully it will start sticking, but having spent six weeks in Madrid recently, I didn't feel this course helped me at all, and I was still struggling with even the most basic conversations. There doesn't seem to be any background to the lessons, or intricacies of the verbs and their conjugations, which are just brushed over.
I've paid for it now, so will keep persevering for the moment, but I regret the purchase.
Response from Rocket Languages
A wide variety of voices are used on Rocket Spanish. They are mainly Latin American, as that is the Spanish being taught. Mauricio is from Chile, there are also voices from Ecuador, Nicaragua, Argentina and more!
I have tried rosetta stone live mocha and berlitz. It is simple easy cost effective method of learning spanish. i have tried other software. This is great learning tool. i have tried arabic language course before. that was also good. I can learn on my pace flex schedule.
I initially loved the course because I used it in my mobile driving back and forth to work.
But once I got to level 3 I found the explanation of the dialogue to be very lacking. Essentially it required me to sit down in front of a computer. It was no longer a course I could do while driving.
I'm stuck on 1.1 It can't recognise me saying the name "Dave" and "Lewis". And Xing for last name and Na for which. I swear I'm saying it long and low but it keeps thinking I'm saing the other na.
I'm still in the free trial and I'm not sure if this is just a bug I can skip or if i have to pass this.
Response from Rocket Languages
We're sorry to hear that you've been having trouble. If you aren't already, we recommend that you use a headset when recording yourself - any background noise can affect the quality of the voice recognition. If you continue to have trouble, please contact the Customer Support team for further assistance.
I definitely loved it even I just try it for a while. However, the price is so HIGH and EXPENSIVE for a student like me.
Very poor experience regarding the numerous simple spelling mistakes and inconsistent and sometimes just plain wrong translations. I expected much more from a paid for language learning tool.
Response from Rocket Languages
Thanks so much for your review. When writing translations, we try to find a balance between being as literal as possible, while also conveying the meaning of a sentence. If there are any phrases you think we could translate more literally, please don't hesitate to send them through to our customer support team. Regarding spelling errors, we are in the process of going through all of the Rocket French lessons at the moment, and so you should soon find that this is no longer an issue. Our apologies for the frustration caused!
Rocket Hindi is my favourite language learning method after reading actual books, which give me much more in depth understanding of grammar.
My fault with it is the use of the inherent vowel at the end of the English (romanised) tranliteration of words and where it’s not pronounced in the middle of some words. It’s a massive let down to the service and gets in the way of every session. The inherent ‘a’ vowel is only pronounced in Sanskrit. So for example the word namaskar, which almost everywhere else is transliterated as namaskar, on Rocket Hindi it’s written namaskara. Your brain is already spending a lot of effort learning new worlds, sounds, spellings, associations. To have to them sift out this ‘a’ all the time is exasperating.
They could simply write something about the inherent vowel at the start of the course. I mean it’s an English Transliteration not the actual spelling anyway. It’s meant to sound how the word is pronounced.
Every time I come across a word while I’m listening to the audio at the same time and it doesn’t match the audio I get a moment of confusion. I have to look hard at the word to see why it’s pronounced differently, if it is the inherent vowel or something else.
I like the interaction in the 'Play it' section but there are problems;
1. The programme frequently states that it has not heard my reply - despite that when I press playback my reply is very clearly there - this is very frustrating and time consuming.
2. The programme makes no allowance for a beginner taking time making a reply which inevitably takes a lot longer than a fluent speaker would take - this again is very frustrating and prevents making best use of the programme.
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.