Rocket German Review

Review summary

Good points

Bad points

Our verdict

Rocket German is an enjoyable, intuitive and rewarding program. It isn't the sleekest and most interactive software available on the market, but it does offer great content, very useful features and excellent technical support. Best of all, it offers these at an attractive price, making it well worth considering.

Full review

Rocket German claims quite boldly that it can take you from a novice to intermediate German speaker within just 8 weeks. This no easy task, so we took a closer look to see how it would fair.

Getting started

Once you've subscribed to Rocket German, you'll be given a login to your online account, from here you access everything you need to participate in the program. Most parts of the program online, however there is one part of the program that you'll need to download onto your computer to use.

Rocket German is split into two seperate stages, each one contains four different lessons. You'll start with greetings, food & drink and travel. With each lesson you start with the interactive audio course. You listen to conversations, which allow you to see the translation in both English and German. At the end you have a quiz that asks you five random questions about you have just learnt.

In stage two you have MegaGerman games.

Teaching approach

Story based learning.

Explained the nuanced meanings behind words that don't translate.

You can click on almost any term or phrase and add it to your notes.

Teaching tools

Rocket German includes interactive audio lessons. Rocket German includes 31 different audio tracks, each lasting around 20 minutes, covering everything you'd need to speak conversational German.

The MegaAudio section pronounces over 1000 words which you are expected to match up with the correct picture and spelling. Another very useful feature is the ability to add your own words and photos that you've acquired from outside the program, making the vocabulary software user expandable.

For advanced users there is a quiz.

Progress tracking

When you login into Rocket German it will remind you when you last visited and last lesson that you completed.

Though there is progress tracking built in to Rocket Language, it can only measure your capability to perform on vocabulary drills and cannot track your comprehension.

Pie charts show how much of the different sections you've completed. Some sections such as games are not included. There is also an indicator which shows you how much

Value for money

You would be hard pressed to find better German language software than Rocket Language when it comes to price.

Ease of use

The software is very easy to use and understand.

Help & support

Rocket Language offers excellent technical support and, unlike many software vendors, their email response time is very fast. You also have the option to post questions on their members only forum - which we found to be a very good source of information, filled with interesting tips and advice from fellow members.

Overall

Rocket German delivers straightforward language tutorials which make learning a new language relatively simple.

We feel that Rocket German offers a straightforward approach to learning a new language and is great value for money, at a third of the price of Rosetta Stone German.

However, it does significantly lack interactivity and if you want a comprehensive language tool that can track your progress at every level, you would be better off buying a title such as Tell Me More.

Looking for learn german software reviews?
See our side-by-side comparisons and in-depth reviews

Overall
Setup
Teaching approach
Teaching tools
Progress tracking
Ease of use
Help & support