Rocket Languages Reviews

I think the overall teaching style of this program is pretty great, but the execution is not there yet.

The major shortcoming is the male's pronunciation. I am a complete beginner to studying Chinese, but it's incredibly obvious his pronunciation is absolutely awful. During the conversations, I can understand the female perfectly fine, but I still can't understand the male speaker well even after studying the lesson. I also worry that I may pick up bad habits myself even listening to his speech.

Another minor drawback is that I do not believe there is a way to zoom in or make the characters larger on the mobile app, which is unfortunate since I tend to study these lessons while exercising on an elliptical or other cardio machine, so the phone is a fair distance away from my eyes.

A feature I wish they would add in the future is increased robustness of the conversations. Instead of teaching us exactly one perfectly scripted conversation, teach us variations. Most of the time there are a handful of different ways someone could say the same thing, so even if the conversation is relatively simple in content, learning just one specific tightly scripted conversation is going to be pretty useless once you step out into the real world.

Overall, Rocket Chinese is founded on good ideas and has solid potential, I hope it will strive to improve and live up to the potential I see.

I started with Rocket German several years ago but somehow got lost in the shuffle of time and situations. I have re-opened my account and find a completely new format so will have to browse the site extensively to feel comfortable but it looks very interesting and seems to have great potential. Thank you.
Marvin W.

The strengths: - The program is mainly focused on learning useful German from the beginning, familiarising the user with common interactions they might have early on.
- The podcasts are entertaining and stop the learning process from becoming boring.
- Easily recommendable, and from what I have heard from reviews of the product, Rocket Languages seem to care about improvements.

The weaknesses: I might be wrong on this, but I feel that a basic explanation of conjugations comes too late, and at first you are forced to entirely learn new words and not to figure out that a lot of different words are just conjugations of one word. For me, I was already familiar with German so this wasn't a problem. I would then recommend to anyone who is using this product and is completely new to German, to learn about basic sentence structure and conjugations from other sources to aid this course.

Despite having studied Italian for years, I am still uncomfortable trying to actually speak the language. With Rocket lessons I have gone back to the beginning and am nicely closing up some of the holes in my knowledge of the language. I am hoping to soon become more at ease with with Italian and more willing to actually test the skills that I am clearly acquiring with my Rocket Languages course.

Good blend of useful phrases, vocabulary, cultural lessons, and written lessons. Best variety of learning tools (audio, student recorded audio vs example, interactive tests, reading, etc...) compared to what I've seen in Rosetta Stone or Pimsleur. No pressure 6 day trial gives you a good opportunity to preview the product. Details of what you receive a little confusing and the price is borderline high although competitive. Will be up to individual if you get your money's worth but the substance is there to take advantage.

Still learning about how to use the app. It seems to work well on my Android phone, and voice recognition does not work on my iPad. I wish I could explore more alternate words and phrases that seem commonly used...according toSpanish speakers I attempt to engage.

Well thought out program. The chunking technique is brilliant and the downloadable .mp3 files are perfect for my commute in the car. I expect the program will be very effective in my learning French!

For the price this is a very good program and the interactive sections are easy to understand. I've used other online programs and so far this one is the best. My main dissatisfaction with it has to do with the organization of the information presented. After the self study sections it would make sense to use the new vocabulary and/or concepts presented during the interactive lessons. For example: There's an entire lesson dealing with the weather but no where in the succeeding interactive lessons is there any discussion of weather. When vocabulary is not used, it's easily forgotten. And you end up with little sense of how to include it in conversation. Also, when new grammatical concepts are introduced in the interactive lessons there isn't always a discussion of the concept. Examples: (1) Nel, nella, negli are presented in unit 4. It's a completely new group of prepositional phrases, but there's no explanation. (2) When nouns ending in E are pluralized, the ending is always i (as in the masculine) regardless of whether the noun is masculine or feminine. I purchased an Italian grammar book and was able to clear up my confusion around this, but it should have been mentioned in one of the lessons where a plural feminine noun ended in an i. These are just the most recent issues of this kind I've encountered. There are more. So, more thought regarding organization and presentation would be warranted.

the excercises are less,even too simple. Every single charpter is well,like order menu,book room,Say,the price is satisfing each one,and I hope it can open to everyone for free,that's exciting, or make some easy games or Words Puzzle; whatever it like , it make learner more keen to learning, and make a better memory,learn all word and prase by heart.

I've used Rocket before for another language. I'm very happy with it. Some things annoy me, for example, mistakes. Just in the first dialog, we are told that "Uno, due, tre" rhymes with "quattro , cinque, sei". But this almost undoes the lesson about pronunciation since 'tre' ends on a pure vowel 'e' and 'sei' ends on a diphthong 'ei'. They don't rhyme. Apart from the mistakes (and I'm hoping there aren't as many as the last time I used this program), I think it's one of the best available. And I do tend to be fussy.