Rocket Languages Reviews

It seems to be working. I've never tried to learn another language but this course has taught me a lot so far and I believe it's teaching me fairly well. I believe there is too much hand holding so far in the beginner course. The translation leans too far on the English side of things and that creates problems. When the English phrase is too far removed from the Japanese translation you end up having to create a middle ground phrase to translate the translation. Some of the phrases translate well to very proper English and would make more sense in my mind, even if that's now how people regularly talk in America. Sometimes a literal translation would do a better job in teaching how phrases will be constructed in Japanese vs English. There are too many instances where I have to figure out how the course is trying to teach something before I can move forward with learning it. Sometimes this takes the form of inconsistencies in the flash cards. I bought the entire Japanese language course on sale and I think that it was pricey but fair. I don't plan on buying any other language courses any time soon, but if I did I would probably buy one from another company simply out of curiosity. I would recommend the Japanese courses to a friend.

The (new) japanese course #1 was great, it made me buy #2 ... which is a mess. The audio is not good, the japanese accent of the english speaker is wrong, the delay for repeating the word is wrong and the content is sometime the same as #1.
To make it worse, the content is highly specific, like opening a bank account, which is really boring and useless for a beginner.

So far, I'm not happy with the way the Spanish course is taught. Lesson 1.7 was hard and seemed out of place. It seems we should have learned numbers, months, and other things first. The voice recognition doesn't seem to work. It will record my voice sometimes but has yet to tell me if I am speaking correctly or not. It only plays back my own voice, but nothing more. Sometimes the voices used by your staff are hard to understand or are speaking too fast for beginners. I'm going to keep trying, but so far, not much is sticking.

The voice of the person speaking in the videos is mad annoying. But besides that the course is not that bad. It's good if you want to learn to write and know how words sound like but the voice recognition don't work at all. Which is the main reason I am giving such a low score, because for how expensive the course is you should be able to learn to speck.

The program keeps locking up on me. I am frustrated. Halfway through the pronunciation part I click the red microphone icon for the current word and it doesn't respond. And at that point I can't get the program to do anything. I have no opinion on the Customer Service as I haven't used it yet.

1, Right now teaching & understanding grammar is weak in the program
2. Need to progress further to decide if I'll buy again
3. decent price when discounted
4. I would explain what I understand of the program at this point.
5. Help with browser recording process almost useless.
"Take Italy Made Easy" (Manu's) videos and couple it with these structured exercises and you'd have a much stronger program.

The main problem that I have is your web app is flaky. Often, in a completely random way, it fails to record my voice. I have talked with customer service and even sent them a video but that want me to make too many changes to my system and do too much work. They should do the work themselves as part of the QA process. And I know others, like my girlfriend, are having the same problem on their own computers. It I did not have this problem I would give you 4 stars.

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.

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Learning languages is really nice here; it sticks. Reciting the vocabulary and having it "graded" is really helpful for pronunciation. The "Play It!" 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.

Voice Recognition is poor.
Especially small words & words starting with letter "S" !!