Rocket Languages Reviews

So far so good. I've only been doing it for 4 days. But it seems thorough, and is more fast-moving than some other apps. Plenty of vocab and grammar. I find some of the chattiness in English in the dialogues tiresome, though, and I wonder why the American guy, Alex, is not a native speaker. Even I can tell he has an accent. Still, it seems to work pretty well.

Rocket Italian provides an excellent platform, but I need to bring self-discipline to the table.

It's hugely better than DuoLingo, and the price is very reasonable.

Immersive and very interactive. Overall a very well rounded program to start learning the basics.
I took a star off because I wish the Arabic sentences were shown in a bigger font for deciphering the language as a beginner.

The cost of the lessons is a bit high for the learners from the developing world

Since I started rocket languages is fun and I like it.

Would be nice to have pictures accompany the spoken phrases for contextual purposes

Russian is a difficult language to learn because it has the Cyrillic alphabet and it quite a distance removed from my native English. I find that I have to repeat each lesson multiple times before I am fluent in the pronunciation and can understand the phrases, so to vary the lessons I go back and review earlier modules as the second part of the lesson and work on the vocab side of things. It would help if the vocab were more organised as the countries and peoples survival guide is done.

I mainly use the phone app but have found that the online version has some extra features such as a) Favourites (which helps me list hard vocab or phrases that need extra work) and a hugely useful feature b) which is typing in Russian on a virtual Cyrillic keyboard. I have just discoveed this and will go back over lessons Intro, One and Two to learn how to write the phrases in Russian.

It might have helped if the introduction had mentioned these features a bit more as I find them very useful and a real aid to learning written Russian.

The only thing I don't like is the American guy from the role playing and videos. I find his lines a little distracting, with the bad jokes. That might just be a matter of personal taste as I'm enjoying the content of the course, it would just be nice to be able to choose from some different options!

Classroom Japanese brought online - with room for improvement.
It's a well structured language training with actual Japanese speaking and good explanations of vocabulary and the language in general. The spoken Japanese really helps with recognition and pronunciation, great to listen to Sayaka and Shota. Having Rocket languages is like having your own language course online.
It is also where I find Rocket languages to be missing opportunities as it focus on providing classroom experience instead of supporting exploring the language trough individual self study.
There are many limitations on what you are allowed to do, for instance when you start a practice you cannot reset it nor show all vocabulary, you are forced to complete it. It would be better if everything would be available all ways.
The text-to-speech is also limited (Google based?), short words are often not understood (adding a random です helps), and longer sentences pronounced wrong is often corrected (saying ​今日はいい天気です。でも、明日は雨です。without the rain is magically corrected).
The biggest limitation is there is no system to help recalling. Vocabulary may be learned but then forgotten again. A Spaced Repetition System is missing although it is recognized as the best way to remember tings long term. All the kanji, kana, sounds and explanations are there, missing are pictures and the SRS itself.
At least there should be a simple way to export it all to e.g. Anki to make up for the limitation.