Rocket Languages Reviews

As with any language, immersion and conversation will get you the farthest, but Rocket Spanish does a good job at giving you a wide range of vocabulary and practice with the spoken language. The reinforcement tools can seem tedious at times, but repetition and commitment is vital to learning a new language. Get it on sale and it is totally worth your time and energy.

Over the years, I have used Rosetta Stone, Babbel and now Rocket. Rocket is what I have been using to learn Italian as I used Rosetta Stone for Spanish mainly. There are things about this I like for learning but I feel this pushes too far toward memorization and not concept or forming sentences and mental recall. I have been doing the daily lesson for 3 straight weeks. I have a good bank of vocabulary, but I am struggling forming sentences for the most part. I will see this through Level 1 for sure and most likely 2, to see how effective it is. I felt more progress at this point through Rosetta stone and their style of learning, but I did it for 6 months daily. Time will tell for Rocket but I am going to go into with my mind open and following their method.

I have liked the program so far but here are my main criticisms:
First, the pacing. I wouldn't say I like having 5 audio lessons consecutively and then 5 language and culture lessons in a row. I prefer to have one audio and one language and culture lesson each time. I also wish these two types of lessons were more related and interconnected. they seem so disjointed and irrelevant right now.
I also wish that there was some sort of spaced repetition feature for reviewing previously learned vocabulary and materials. Therefore I have to manually make flashcards in another program (Anki) for this which is a little cumbersome than having them readily available.
I would like to see some new features for exercising the learned vocabulary and grammar instead of just repeating the limited number of sentences in each lesson and requiring the students to form and come up with new sentences.

I have tried every audio software and physical classes to learn languages; Rocket is the first course I have actually enjoyed and stuck to! The content is very in depth and engaging; I particularly like how they explain how the language works culturally. As I am living in Italy I found this very useful. It is the most interactive software and the various tool really make you feel like you are making progress while making it easy to memorise.

Love everything so far, but I’ve noticed that you are changing the voice actors with the audio files. In my opinion, I’d prefer the original combination of the English Kenny and the ‘Osaka’ kansai-jin Sayaka...especially Sayaka, whose accent, in both nihongo-ga and eigo-ga is very helpful in terms of realistic Japanese phonetics. The new Sayaka is less ‘endearing’ and the new Kenny-san has perhaps a too refined Kanto-style accent.

Overall, I'm very satisisfied with the product and approach so far, particularly coming from 7 months of Duolingo. It is a significant upgrade in experience over Duolingo. It has the right balance of drill and practice and grammar fundamentals, in the context of a conversation-driven leaning style. It seems natural and well thought out. I truly appreciate that I can skip what I want in deference to things I already know. I know I will soon get to things I will not be able to skim or skip and I look forward to that. The "say it" element of the structure is excellent. It is forcing me to speak, which is exactly what Duolingo does not do well. I have lots of words and lots of conjugations, but on the spot I am like a deer in the headlights, and Rocket's style forces you to just "talk", mistakes and all, which is great. The speed and clarity of the voice actors is excellent and it makes listening easy and approachable. The rolling text approach on screen is great, as I can look at the scroll when I want to and look away (to test myself better) when I don't want to.

A couple of constructive things to say.

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There's a myriad of good resources for language learning, and the audio helps a lot with pronunciation. Rocket Languages has great tools for language learning, without a doubt. The cultural immersion components are a fun way to learn about culture as well, because that is vital to learning a language as well.

Rocket French is an excellent product. My greatest struggle (to date) is understanding spoken French. Rocket French does a much better job with this than other platforms. I also really like the lifetime ownership.

Something to improve is the voice recognition. It doesn't work all that well, and is often frustrating. Other than that, great product.

Great language course with tools that are easy to use and reinforce learning. Lot's of practice with pronunciation. I like that one of the instructors is native and one is not, provides a balanced perspective and real world examples.

I have been using Duolingo because it's free, but it's not meeting my needs. I like that Rocket Spanish helps with my pronunciation, which Duolingo did not. I had a coupon so I'm willing to give Rocket Spanish a try for 60 days! Plus, I already had the headphones with a mic so why not??