Rocket Languages Reviews

My feelings with this course are quite mixed. On one hand, there is a lot of material and you pick up useful phrases from the very start. On the other hand there are several issues which in the long run are quite frustrating especially in the testing part

1) Apart from the Quiz section, everything else is clearly automatically generated from the material. This means you can have the same word repeated 2 or 3 times. In the "Know it" part there are cases where you cannot know what to say because two words have the same english translation (tourist).
2) Speech recognition is frustrating. It stops listening while you are talking, sometimes it doesn't want to recognize what you say no matter what (I even tried playing back the native audio from my phone near to the computer microphone, and it didn't even recognize the native speaker!) and sometimes it says 100% even if you mess up a few syllabes.

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Guys, Rocket Language found a great platform to learn Hindi. I learnt like a baby, very easy and simple way they have to teach their students. Rocket language not only focusing on any one, it focuses reading & writing including speaking. The most important thing would like to share with you is listening, listening is a very grabbing tool for learning any language. To me, it is my ambition to learn Hindi specially writing skills as it is so complex but interesting.
I would appreciate and recommend Rocket Language to learn Hindi and/or any other language.
Good Luck everyone.

Iqbal Ahmed
Karachi-Pakistan

Learning Russian is really nice here; it sticks. Reciting the vocabulary and having it "graded" is really helpful for pronunciation. The "Role Playing" 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.

The course is effective and I am making progress, but the voice recognition software is very glitchy and inconsistent.

So far I find the recording of my voice/voice recognition extremely frustrating. I have used a headset, my airpods and nothing at all and it doesn't recognize what I saw half the time. Even easy words like ciao and sei. Everything else is ok so far, not totally user friendly. I will try it out longer and see how it goes. But, I strongly recommend working on the voice recognition. There are many products out there that work really well with this, such as Dragon my Nuance. Maybe use their software to recognize what people are saying.

Rocket Languages site provides a convenient atmosphere to learn a foreign language. By giving point for each action you do, it encourage you more to advance in your learning process. Overall, I am quite satisfied with the service I received from this site.

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.

I have been using the program for about a month and a half now and I have found it somewhat useful. My level is above that of a new beginner but not quite yet intermediate. My concerns about the program, starting with the idea that most people want what will be most useful i.e. picking up useful spoken language for travel, is that particularly when testing, the program expects your responses to be almost in the same order as their introduction. If the expected answer starts with Tu and you use the Vous form, you are marked as incorrect. The program should note what form is wanted. A "hint" function also would be nice to help someone with responses as learning, not just simple memorization, is the goal. The program also occasionally makes some unexpected detours from what is useful. For example, one lesson moved from general travel issues to a flight of fancy to go skiing. I did not find a lot of useful information in that lesson. Finally, today I took a test which contained a large number of questions involving the "passe simple". The last question on the test asked how much one would expect to hear the passe simple and the correct answer was "almost never". So, I feel a lot of time was wasted that could have been better spent elsewhere. I hope these comments are considered helpful. There are good things here but a few tweaks would make it much better.

A good way to learn some basic language skills that can assist with getting around a foreign country.

I've only done the trial version but I decided not to buy it not because of the content; the material is quite good actually and, considering it's for life, the price is fair as well. But the activities cannot be done through mobile or app properly, the recording won't recognize what's said, the written activities never goes on to the next, the platform only works properly on desktop PC and the whole purpose is that you can learn anywhere, whenever. If I can't use my mobile and be alone when recording my pronunciation or I can't answer the cards on my free time then the "anywhere/whenever" thing is null