Rocket Spanish Review 2020: In-Depth And Detailed

The Rocket Language series is a very popular online – based language learning program that allows users to acquire new languages through audio lessons, workbooks, quizzes, games, and more.  One of their flagship titles, and arguably their most popular seller, is Rocket Spanish.

Spanish is one of the most widely spoken languages in the world, and for English speakers is one of the easier second languages to learn.  Opportunities abound for those learning to practice with native speakers, and it’s immensely helpful for traveling as the amount of countries that speak Spanish is quite numerous.

So how does Rocket Spanish stack up, and what’s included?  Read on for our in-depth Rocket Spanish review and tour. Now updated for the 2020 version!!

Breakdown – Rocket Spanish Review 2020

The Rocket Spanish course helps people learn the language through a variety of different methods, and is broken down into several segments.

The Audio Lessons / Language And Culture – Rocket Spanish Review 2020

The most heavily promoted part of the course are the audio lessons.  These lessons range from 15 minutes to a half hour, and provide opportunities for the person taking the course to repeat back words in order to master pronunciation as well as retention.  It’s funny how in the first lesson you are constantly reminded to repeat the phrases out loud.  However, I must say that following the instructions and actually repeating the phrases is key to your success in learning the language.  I found the audio lessons to progress at a good pace; not too slow and not too fast.  They are also quite clear in terms of audio quality; the speakers are very articulate and easy to understand.

You can download the audio lessons as MP3 files in order to listen to them on your iPod or other MP3 device if you’re not connected to the internet.  This allows you to easily listen to them on the go.  I suggest that you do this and listen to the audio lessons several times each in order to really drill them into your memory.

The audio lessons come with transcripts underneath so you can see the words spelled out, another great feature.

Included among the audio lessons and Language and Culture sections are lessons on how the Spanish language works.  This is an often overlooked component to many learn at home language courses.  These lessons are very important to your understanding of how Spanish grammar works.  Spanish has different sentence structure vs English, and it’s important to know these things when getting out and speaking on your own.

Mobile Friendly

The Rocket Languages app was brand new for 2017 and is a pleasure to use!  Word from Rocket Languages headquarters is that they are rolling out even more app improvements for the 2018 version.  The interface is responsive, meaning you can access your lessons from your phone or iPad as easily as you can from your PC or Mac.  The New York Times even wrote a glowing review of the mobile readiness of the Rocket Languages series!

Tracking Your Progress

In order to keep you motivated and on track there is a progress meter that shows how many days in a row of the week you’ve logged in and done lessons.  This helps to keep you on track and gives you an incentive to keep the chain unbroken.  The lessons themselves are color coded so that you can see what you’ve completed and how well you’ve done.  This quizzes you at the end of each lesson and allows you to rate yourself on how well you have learned each lesson and the vocabulary and phrases within.  Your progress in the overall course will then be displayed.

The program also gives you different badges as you advance through the course as a reward.  The badges are then displayed by your username in the online forum community area.

Audio Comparison And Practice

One cool feature of the Rocket Spanish course is that you can compare your pronunciation to that of the person in the lesson using a mapped out wave form.  You can then replay individual words and work on your pronunciation.  Basically all of the vocabulary and phrases are recorded like this for your benefit.  It’s helpful in terms of getting your pronunciation just right, and the repetition is key.

The 2018 updated version makes this very simple, clean, and easy to use.  It’s not always perfect as far as the pronunciation, however it’s usually pretty spot on.  You can increase the difficulty from Easy to Medium to Hard.  It’s pretty satisfying to get those green 100% badges!

Advanced Learning Techniques

One interesting part of this course is the “Advanced Learning Techniques” section.  This part of the course is a series of articles that is designed to give you pep talks, strategies about learning styles, and basic pointers about memory and learning languages.  These are great for helping you to stick to your goals as sometimes learning a language can be difficult and tedious – especially if you’re doing it on your own without a teacher and grades to keep you on task.

Games

The flashcard games offer a fun, although not super innovative, way to reinforce your Spanish vocabulary.  They got rid of the older games featuring pictures of the phrases, however they weren’t always super helpful.  The new flashcards section is clean, easy to use, and can be more easily updated by the Rocket Langauges staff to include more phrases on the fly.

Community And Forum

If you’re looking for help there is a community forum that anyone with access to the Rocket Spanish program can post in.  You can ask questions and get advice from other members.  I wish this community were a bit more active, however I will say that I posted a question in there recently and got a bunch of answers from users right away.  I’m not sure that the community is very active in general, but it can be very hard to cultivate an active online forum, and there are other forums around the internet that can fill this need for you.

Customer Support And Guarantee

If you get stuck with the program you can contact the Rocket Languages company at any point for helpful and friendly customer service.  And if for any reason you don’t like the Rocket Spanish program or don’t think that it’s what you expected you have a full 60 day money back guarantee.  I think this purchase security is a great feature of Rocket Spanish.

I found their customer service team to be extremely responsive even when I wasn’t contacting them with a particular problem.  I had posted a question on the Rocket Languages member message board and received an email from support answering the question more specifically.  It was a nice surprise.

Free Trial – Rocket Spanish Review 2020

You can try out Rocket Spanish thanks to their free trial offer, which might be a great way for you to see if it’s something you want to try out.

Click here to check out the six day free trial.

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Conclusion

Before this review gets too long winded, I’d like to wrap up by saying that personally I think that Rocket Spanish is an excellent way to introduce yourself to the language.  The 2020 update has made it even better!  No matter what the reason is that you’re learning Spanish, I really think that if you set aside time each day to use this program that you will make excellent progress and be speaking and understanding Spanish confidently.

Is this course perfect?  No.  If you really want to be fluent you’re going to have to go beyond Rocket Spanish.  But no course will make you fluent in 3 months either.  What you get out of the course depends very much on how much you put into it.

I would also suggest that you do supplemental things such as watching Spanish movies as well as reading Spanish publications such as People magazine’s Spanish edition.  This is what I did while I was taking Spanish courses and it put me well ahead of the curve.

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