Rocket Languages Reviews

The speech recognition software is terrible. If it wants to give you a score from 0 to 100, I'm fine with that but to have to keep on repeating myself and yelling only to see "I didn't catch that try again" is more than frustrating. So I'm just skipping trying to talk into the mic for now. And my Google Chrome is updated. My mic is a very good one.

the audio recognition needs work. Also stop asking me to review every six times i record a word.

So far I find the recording of my voice/voice recognition extremely frustrating. I have used a headset, my airpods and nothing at all and it doesn't recognize what I saw half the time. Even easy words like ciao and sei. Everything else is ok so far, not totally user friendly. I will try it out longer and see how it goes. But, I strongly recommend working on the voice recognition. There are many products out there that work really well with this, such as Dragon my Nuance. Maybe use their software to recognize what people are saying.

Very good. Unfortunately, I can not find more time to learn Rocket Chinese

So much potential….but the play buttons in the app work sporadically. Records just fine and voice recognition is great. But I Have to reboot my iPad Air quite often to clear the issue. Note that The coin is flipped on the web site - which I tried hoping to address the play buttons in the app not working. Well - the play buttons work fine on the web site - but the voice record says “having trouble” on every single item. And I am, per the instructions, using safari and the red microphone is on (not crossed out or greyed out). As such - this tool can’t really be used. Will try tomorrow - maybe a server issue. Ready to request full refund if issue(s) persist. Exasperating experience. May resort to old fashioned Pimsleur CDs to prepare for vacation to france in a few months.

Very monotonous and hard to follow material. I can't keep engaged in the material. Super boring content.

I purchased the English rocket language, but I have encountered some issues with the audio on the Android app. The words and phrases do not play correctly, but they do work properly on the laptop browser. However, when trying to record on the laptop browser, only the last part of the word or half of the sentence is recorded, which is very inconvenient. As a solution, I have been playing the words and sentences on my laptop browser and attempting to record on the Android app. Rocket language has a 60-day refund policy, so I will be requesting a full refund due to these issues.

Overall, I think the Rocket French folks have developed a pretty good system to learn French, so I won't go into detail about the things that I like. The big downside, however, is how their system tracks how far you've progressed in each module. For example, I just finished module 3.9, and the icons have changed from no color to the following colors and comments:

FLASHCARDS = ORANGE (GOOD)
HEAR-IT = ORANGE (GOOD)
WRITE-IT = ORANGE (GOOD)
KNOW-IT = ORANGE (GOOD)
QUIZ = GREEN (EASY)

That is not sufficient. What I want (and need) to know is how often I have reviewed each module and how I have done each time. So I have created an offline spreadsheet that shows the following for each section that I have studied. For example here is how I have tracked section 3.4 that I have reviewed several times and self-graded:

11/8/22 = D, 11/9/22 = C, 11/20/22 = C, 11/23/22 = B

You can see that first studied this module on 11/8/22, and then reviewed is subsequently three times, and my self-grade has improved from the initial D to a B. And, instead of a self-grade, I would much prefer to see the percentage of answers I got right.

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Buggy on Ventura Safari, the most current MacOS and browser version.

Travelogue way too advanced and difficult to avoid.

Encountered user setup error that service and support quickly corrected.

So far greatly prefer Pimsleur and will likely invoke refund option.

The more I go through the course, the more frustrating it gets. Instead of learning and practicing individual words, I'm supposed to memorize incredibly complex sentences without understanding the meaning of how all the words work together in the sentence. There is no logical progression from learning words to forming sentences. As a result, I forget everything immediately and feel demotivated. And I stumble over the pronunciation because I have to say ten new words at a time. There is no daily reinforcement of previous lessons, which makes the course meaningless over time.