Rocket Languages Reviews

Seeing all the rave reviews makes me wonder if there's something wrong with me. I am not a linguistic novice; I am a native speaker of English but a fluent speaker of Korean, I majored in linguistics in graduate school, and I've studied several languages both in university classes and on my own. But I'm having a hard time making any progress in Rocket Chinese. Eleven- or twelve-morpheme sentences are just too long for a beginner in the language. And while Lin Ping's spoken examples are very clear and easy to understand, David always sounds like his mouth is full of food and everything runs together. (I'm sure his Chinese is very good, but Chinese itself tends to sound like that to start with. It's just really frustrating.)

I bought the complete premium course and am wondering if I made a terrible decision.

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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I like the program, though it goes VERY slowly and each unit is terribly long. But the biggest problem is that after working for awhle on a unit it crashes and I get a message saying "aw snap, something went wrong". This happens every day

UMMMMM FIRST OF ALL IT WON'T LET ME DO OTHER LESSONS BECAUSE I'M JUST DOING THE FREE PART - IT ADVERTISES THAT IT'S FREE - A COMPLETE TRICK!!!! OUTRAGEOUS! IT DOESN'T TEACH YOU PROPERLY - IT TELLS YOU TO REPEAT THE STATEMENT/QUESTION AND THAT'S IT!!! NOTHING ELSE! I AM VERY UNSATISFIED WITH THE WHOLE EXPERIENCE AND WOULD RECOMMEND NOT LEARNING FRENCH FROM THIS HORRIBLE WEBSITE - I WOULD SUGGEST NOT EVEN LOOKING AT THIS WEBSITE!!! A SCAM, I TELL YOU!

Out is very difficult to get the scoring of certain spoken words to work properly. Course 9.11 is the most frustrating Rocket Spanish lesson so far. In the"Hear it Say it" module, every single infinitive - conocer, poder, querer, etc- could not be scored 100% no matter how it was pronounced.

I am generally very happy with the spoken feedback and the quality of the instruction of Spanish.

Unfortunately often my mic fails to pick up my spoken answer correctly. I bought a special mic for my iPhone and I hope that the mic performance will improve.

However, I need to review and practice hard points such as writing with the correct accent marks. Doing the harder parts of lessons several times is helpful.

I am very pleased with being able to download lesson lectures. Then I can practice away from the computer. This is very helpful.

One problematic lesson:

In Module one of Rocket Spanish, there is one lesson that is poorly designed. Presently I am doing the alphabet. Why is there no spoken practice of the alphabet? Words are presented as a vocabulary list to be memorized. How useless. ! But there is no testing or practice of spelling which is the object of the lesson. This pointless presentation of the alphabet is unlike the quality of other lessons. I wish it could be redone.

Also, in this lesson it is argued that the alphabet is related to learning the correct pronunciation of Spanish.

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Very disappointed in this product. Trial was very good. Purchased Step #1 with coupon. Have not received access nor response to my many emails. Feel like I was suckered. Again Free Trial very good. Enticing once paid nothing. Again maybe a glitch. No response from Customer Service opens the door for negative assumptions

I enjoy the conversations that Rocket Italian is based on, but as a language instructor that uses strictly immersion techniques, I can't stand the amount of English that is in each lesson. There is SO much room for additional vocab that could be taught through the use of more exclusive Italian. It makes me frustrated to waste so much time on English banter. I am really struggling to make use of this course.

Rocket Languages is an excellent way to learn a language . It opens you up to how you can pronounce the language through following the tutor. I enjoy the bit where you have to write because it is a good practice to know the words and how to pronounce them. I also like the flash cards because they enable you to pronounce and get to hear if you are doing it properly. My favorite is the quiz because it gives me the opportunity to show that I understand what I have been learning. I like Rocket Languages to an extend that I will not hesitate to recommend it to anyone willing to try it. I enjoy it when it also corrects spelling to show you where you went wrong right away.

The grading system is all over the place. They have a colour coded system that is meant to reflect proficiency but it patently doesn't correspond with any of the lessons. I completed all the modules available, everything was correct but the colour coded system gave me 1 green tick and 4 yellow symbols. It makes no sense.

I asked for an explanation for this but the response made little sense too.

I think somewhere in the Rocket system is a great app waiting to break out but it is currently too cumbersome which is a pity.

They ask users to write something awesome, they are assuming people think the app is awesome when it isn't yet.