Rocket Languages Reviews

I'm liking this much more than Memrise right now ;) I would recommend this for anyone who is travelling and needs a ready arsenal of ready and relevant vocabulary to make their way around their target country.

I have tried a few different resources in starting out with Italian. I have to say that I am glad I completed Paul Noble's audio course before starting with this - as the pace of learning with Rocket is much faster. The downside is that I find the learning much less "sticky" - the audio lessons simply don't have enough structured repetition of material to make the words stay in your memory. I find a lot of the exercises pointless too - I really don't want to repeat "sto bene" or "ciao" 100 times - although the recording facility is useful (not much point in relying on the software to rate your pronunciation - it's actually more useful to listen to yourself back).

Having said that, the course is enjoyable, and it's nice that it uses contemporary subject matter as well as "real" Italian. I tried a few Pimsleur lessons too and that was really, really bad - very out of date, with some cringe-worthy material. Just awful.

I find the most useful lessons the non-audio ones , oddly enough. No one course is enough when you are learning a language - I supplement Rocket with Italian films, a fantastic audio resource which cost me 95 PENCE ! (Rilkey's 613 Italian dialogues) - reading Italian newspapers and short story books, Duolingo, and any opportunity I get to speak in real situations.

I'm not sure I would buy the advanced levels of the course - but I am enjoying using the first level partly as revision and partly to lean new things.

The course structure enables learner to advance at his or her own pace. Sometimes the sentences are too long and the pronunciation too difficult to hear - even though my hearing is excellent. When I do these activities in Rocket Korean and upon listening to Pimsleur Korean in my car, I find that the Korean sound system to be more challenging than the sound system in most other languages. Perhaps being able to hear sounds at a slower pace would benefit me until I know more about how to enunciate the sounds as a Korean speaker does.

While I use the Chrome browser as directed, I must say - "All that glitters is not chrome!" Sometimes the system slows down and requires that I log out and log back on. This is a technical issue more with Chrome than with Rocket Korean.

This is a very good program to learn Spanish , Latin American variation , not Castilian Spanish of Spain. I understand that this version of Spanish is more useful for Americans who probably make up the bulk of the clientele of people wanting to learn Spanish. This version of Spanish will allow people to travel in South America and make themselves understood there and in the South of Spain , where the majority of Spanish Emigrants left for a new life in the former Spanish Colonies. Cuba used to be the destination for economic migrants from the Spanish Peninsular until the Americans liberated , "stole" , the last colonies of Cuba , Puerto Rico and the Philippians, which was then impossible, after the Spanish American War of eighteen ninety eight, which caused then a profound soul searching of the Spanish People, on the loss of their colonies to the United States of America, and the birth of a new generation of Spanish Poets of 1898. That said, the language is useful, if you want to travel in the Republic of Argentina or Chile. It reminds me of the Spanish I was taught many years ago by my first Spanish Teacher who was a refugee from Chile. The only difficulty would be in speaking to a native of Madrid with their Castilian Accent. I recommend this course but hopefully the course creators will be able to tweak the program so it does not keep crashing in the recommended browser " Chrome " !

My preference would have been to experience other French tutorial products first for comparative purposes, however, this does not diminish my initial assesment of RocketFrench which has been surprisingly impressive for the three modules completed so far. The product is very well structured with an intuitive interface and excellent audio tracks. The light humorous approach makes the work of learning French easy, fun and most of all memorable. I believe that my re-assesment of RocketFrench will probably be deserving of five stars as I progress through the remaining modules.

I first bought this language program over a year a go, just for fun but though my own fault, I didn't really appreciate nor use it properly, hence no results.

Recently, my reasons for needing to speak Italian changed and as with all goals, when you have a big enough "why" you find a way instead of finding excuses and since restarting with a routine and discipline, I have to say, I now look forward to my daily sessions.

I have only needed to contact Customer service once over an issue with the voice recognition and the auto responder email states service will be four to five days which for me is way too long. that said, I can comment favourably on a number of other things; the structure, the layout, and even the voice recognition for the majority of the time. but there is one thing I really like a lot! In fact, because of this, I discovered something about myself I didn't realise was such a driver for me. The Leaderboard!

The platform awards points for learning and displays your position benchmarked against other members over various time frames, last 24 hours, 7 days and so on.

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I was very apprehensive about buying this because I'm a student and this seemed like a huge investment. That impression changed after the first module. I had been trying to learn French from YouTube tutorials and Duolingo for a while and Rocket's software did better than both of those and has made me feel that it was worth the price I paid. Thank you.

I am learning French. The program is good but far from perfect. There are problems with voice recognition. Level 1, Chapter 5 has a summary test that tests words that have never been introduced. Who proofs this stuff? One new word, 'manquer', translation "miss". What kind of miss? The "stories" are usually 25 minutes long and of little value. Customer support? Virtually nonexistent. During weekday normal hours there is a help desk, when you complain about something she will refer to IT department. IT department has a perfect record of never getting back to me so I quit writing notes to improve the course. The French course is good but could be much better if Rocket had interest in improving.

Rocket Spanish is well organized and fairly easy to use. I definitely like the experience and the process. HOWEVER - They are very wishy-washy with the meanings of phrases. In an effort to teach you different phrases to say the same thing, the designers forget that words have meaning. For example, early in the lessons you discuss someone's job. They tell you that the question, "What do you do?" can be asked ?Que haces?, which is correct. Unfortunately, they also tell you that you can say, ?En que trabajas?, which is not correct. That phrase means, "What is your work?". It may sound like I'm knit-picking, bc in the context of the conversation, either phrase will do, but it is confusing when I don't know what you are asking for. In the testing, it asks me to say in Spanish "What do you you?", but it says that I was incorrect bc I responded ?Que haces?. - WHICH IS CORRECT!! The designer of the course wanted me to say ?En que trabajas?. The student isn't a mind reader, and when he/she tries to apply the words learned, it is easy to get confused. Again, words have meaning. It is lazy to say that it is "close enough", when it is in-fact no where near what you are trying to say.

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I love how organized it is. Rocket Languages also does a fantastic job at keeping track of progress and achievements, which is nice. The way the language is taught has been fairly simple so far, which makes it easy to remember and to understand.