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Rocket Spanish Review

Last Updated on December 13, 2023.

Rocket Spanish

Rating 3.8

Summary

Rocket Spanish is a pretty good Spanish course, but it’s not my personal favorite. Although I find the lessons tend to be very boring, the content is well structured and fairly comprehensive. There is a good mixture of listening, speaking, grammar, and review activities.


Quality 4.0

The app and the lessons are well designed, but I experienced some minor annoyances.

Thoroughness 4.0

There are lots of practice activities following each lesson, and course structure seems logical.

Value 3.5

Not cheap but not absurdly expensive either.

I Like
  • Lessons are well structured and use increasingly more Spanish as you move up.
  • The streamlined interface makes it easy to navigate lessons and activities.
  • You’ll certainly learn a lot if you complete the exercises and review activities.
  • Speaking practice is emphasized in the audio lessons and in numerous exercises.
I Don’t Like
  • I found the audio lessons to be painfully boring.
  • I thought the cultural lessons were poorly done and felt lazy.
  • Although the reinforcement exercises are helpful, you’ll likely get sick of them.
Price

Level 1 costs $150.99. Levels 1 & 2 cost $300. Levels 1, 2 & 3 cost $450 (though you can often find discounts).

Alternatives: Check out this page that highlights the best and worst online Spanish courses. 

Rocket Spanish is a pretty good course. It’s not my favorite, but it’s not bad either.

For some people, it could be exactly what they’re looking for in a course. Personally, I’d prefer to use something else. It just wasn’t a great fit for my learning style.

I like the fact that it provides a structured learning plan, forces you to speak throughout, provides lots of opportunities to review, and doesn’t shy away from grammar explanations/practice.

But, I found the audio lessons boring, the cultural lessons felt lazy, and I’m sure I’d eventually get tired of their review exercises.

If you can push yourself to consistently use Rocket Spanish, I’m sure you’ll learn a great deal. I would just have a hard time getting myself to continually complete the lessons.

In this review, I’ll share what it’s actually like to use Rocket Spanish — the things that annoy me, and those that are done well. I’ll also include some possible alternatives.

Course Structure

There are three levels of Rocket Spanish, and each level contains between 5-7 modules.

In each module, there are 3 types of lessons: interactive audio lessons, language and culture lessons, and the survival kit lessons.

Typically, you’ll find between 4-6 interactive audio lessons and 4-6 language and culture lessons within each module, and 6-13 survival kit lessons per level.

In total, there are over 200 lessons split between the three levels of Rocket Spanish.

While these lessons probably won’t be enough to get you to fluency, you could likely reach a solid intermediate level with them. Of course, using Rocket Spanish in conjunction with some other tools would help you progress even faster.

Now, let’s take a detailed look at what each of these lessons is like, starting with the interactive audio lessons.

Interactive Audio Lessons

The first lessons you’ll find are the interactive audio lessons, which typically last between 20-30 minutes.

They generally start out with a quick review of the previous lesson and then tell you a little more about what will be included in this lesson. The hosts will have a short conversation in Spanish which will then be discussed throughout the audio lesson.

The lessons are interactive in the sense that you’re meant to speak throughout. If you don’t speak out loud, you won’t get as much out of the courses.

They focus on conversational language, but there’s also a fair amount of attention paid to grammar and explanations of various aspects of the Spanish language.

At the beginner level, there are two hosts. One usually speaks English and the other speaks entirely in Spanish. At levels 2 and 3, there were three hosts, two of which speak entirely in Spanish.

Plus, Rocket recently added a feature that allows you to slow down the recording to hear the hosts more clearly in order to successfully repeat key words and phrases.

Personally, I found the audio lessons to be really boring.

That’s not necessarily a problem unique to Rocket Spanish, but I’ve seen others describe their lessons as fun and interesting — I simply don’t agree.

In their defense, they appear to try to make it more fun by having some lighthearted moments, but I thought it just felt extremely scripted and a bit cheesy.

The Spanish speaking hosts model their language very clearly, often saying a word or phrase several times and leaving space for you to repeat. Sometimes they’ll break down a word into smaller parts, getting you to produce shorter sounds in isolation before combining them.

Frequently, the English speaking host will ask, “How do you say” and leave a space where you’re meant to answer in Spanish. I like how you’re not always just repeating a sentence but actually have to remember how to say it.

One thing that drives me crazy in the audio lessons is how often the host says, “You should have said ….” after you fill in the pause by speaking out loud.

It may not sound so bad, but when you hear “You should have said” a couple dozen times in a single lesson, it can become seriously annoying.

They could have easily cut out these “You should have said” parts from the lessons. If instead, the host would just say the sentence in Spanish after the pause, it’d be just as clear what you were supposed to say.

Rocket Spanish includes lots of comments on grammar and culture throughout the audio lessons. This is pretty helpful as you’ll get plenty of explanations on things that may be confusing.

At the end of the lesson, there’s a quick review of the dialogue and keywords learned in the lesson.

You’ll also find that you can play the conversation by itself. Additionally, there’s a transcript of the conversation in which you can read the dialogue, play individual lines, and record yourself.

There’s also an Extra Vocabulary section. This includes all of the different phrases that you’ll have heard throughout the audio lesson with the same options of reading, listening, and recording yourself.

It’s a nice addition since much of the Spanish content from the lessons doesn’t necessarily come from the dialogue but instead from the explanations and conversation.

Rocket Reinforcement

Much of the benefit of using Rocket Spanish comes from the many ways that you’ll review what you’ve learned in the lessons.

If you complete all of the activities in this section, you should have no problem remembering what you’ve learned.

Review comes in the form of five activities:

  • Flashcards
  • Hear it! Say it!
  • Write it!
  • Know it!
  • Quiz

Let’s now take a look at what it’s like to go through each of these activities.

Flashcards

The first part of the Rocket Reinforcement is the flashcards. You can choose to first show a word in English or Spanish, and decide if you want to have audio included.

It is worth noting that Rocket no longer features the “custom flashcard” element that had allowed you to create and save words you want to circle back to after a certain lesson. The pre-made flashcards still help you review the material in the current lesson, though.

The flashcards only include words from the current lesson, but I’d imagine many people would struggle to remember content from a lesson they finished a week or two prior. Those are the words that would make more sense to review.

Because of this, I’d suggest using a different program like Anki or Memrise. These platforms use an SRS (spaced repetition system) which makes practice more efficient by having you study the words you have the most trouble with the most frequently.

Periodically reviewing the content from these lessons on one of those platforms would make it more difficult to forget what you’ve learned in earlier lessons.

The good news is that Rocket Spanish makes it easy to export the vocabulary you’ve learned so that you can add it to one of those other programs.

Hear it! Say it!

In this section, you’ll hear a phrase in Spanish and record yourself saying the same phrase and receive a grade on how accurate your pronunciation was.

Afterward, you’ll manually choose whether it was hard, good, or easy.

There are three options for the Rocket Record difficulty – easy, medium, or hard. Supposedly this makes it so that you can adjust how strictly the voice recognition software will grade your recordings.

In practice, I didn’t notice much difference between the three levels. I also found the gradings for the recordings to be really inconsistent.

Sometimes I would intentionally say things completely wrong and be marked correct. Other times I’d say things correctly and be marked wrong. Occasionally, I’d add in random syllables and was surprised to see that the software picked up exactly what I said.

There are some other courses and apps that also use voice recognition software, and none of them work particularly well. Hopefully, the technology will improve significantly within a few years and make this much more accurate.

Regardless, it’s definitely helpful to record yourself speaking Spanish and hear your pronunciation.

Don’t get annoyed if your recordings are graded poorly in this section, but don’t become overly confident if they’re graded well, either!

Machines still aren’t good enough to judge your speech yet, so don’t rely on them. I’d highly recommend getting feedback from a real person.

Speechling is a platform that’s great for this; you can submit an unlimited number of recordings and have them graded by a native Spanish speaker.

Write it!

This section is composed of dictation exercises. You’ll hear a word or phrase and have to write it down.

If you make a mistake, the correction will be marked in red. It’s a pretty helpful way to remember to use accents when writing. There’s also a virtual keyboard that you can use to add diacritical marks, which is a nice touch.

This part works pretty well and can definitely help you improve your Spanish spelling.

Again, after clicking the reveal button, you’ll self-grade based on how difficult it was for you.

Know it!

In this activity, you’ll be given an English phrase and have to say it in Spanish. Just like earlier, you’ll record yourself speaking and be given a score on how accurately you said it.

This is another pretty useful way to reinforce what you’ve learned. It forces you to produce the language instead of simply understanding or repeating it.

Quiz

I thought the quiz section was quite well done; unfortunately, it only included five questions.

Many other courses that have quizzes often make the answers far too easy. The quizzes on Rocket Spanish contain options that could look correct if you haven’t yet mastered the content. This requires you to actually know your stuff.

Language and Culture Lessons

The second type of lesson on Rocket Spanish is the Language and Culture lesson.

In these lessons, there isn’t an audio lesson for you to listen to. Instead, everything is written out, sort of like a textbook.

The language part is generally quite a bit longer and primarily focuses on important grammatical information. These can be really detailed and, although most people don’t love grammar, I think it’s important to learn.

I found this section to be thorough, easy to understand, and useful.

The structure is pretty similar to the audio lessons as well. There are still quite a few recordings scattered throughout the lessons and places where you should record yourself speaking.

At the end of these lessons, there’s Rocket Reinforcement with the same type of review activities we’ve already looked at.

The cultural section is a lot shorter and not that good in my opinion.

The cultural lessons are focused on Latin America as a whole, which makes sense because the course is about Latin American Spanish.

But obviously, Latin America is a huge region with tons of distinct cultures. While these cultural lessons touch the surface of a lot of different countries, they never go particularly deep anywhere.

I think it would be far more interesting to look more deeply at one culture at a time, changing countries or regions in each lesson.

The fact that these cultural lessons are so short makes it pretty much impossible to learn much from them. They’re typically under 300 words. Compare that to this very review: it’s over 2500 words.

It would be easy for these lessons to be really interesting, instead, they just feel half-assed.

Survival Kit Lessons

The final type of lesson found in Rocket Spanish is their Survival Kit Lessons. Rocket recently updated the survival lessons to make them more streamlined and less repetitive.

These are fairly useful but not really my favorite either. There are around 6-13 of them found at the end of each level.

You’ll essentially just learn vocabulary and phrases without context. I’d much prefer learning new words in context by using something like LingQ where you can read interesting content at a suitable difficulty level.

You’ll have all the same features as before, such as the recordings of words and the chance to record yourself speaking.  You’ll also see all the same Rocket Reinforcement activities at the end.

There’s useful stuff to learn here, but it’s not my favorite way of studying. If I were to learn words out of context like this, I’d rather export the vocabulary to Anki as that will make it easier to commit them to long-term memory.

Rocket Spanish Forum

Many language-learning programs offer an online forum where you can ask questions or practice conversation with fellow learners. Rocket offers forums for each language in its program.

While a user forum is not an innovative or unique feature, it is still a good place to go if you have a question about a feature of the app, or if you want to try out a sentence in Spanish with a safe audience.

Is Rocket Spanish Worth Paying For?

Rocket Spanish isn’t the cheapest course around, costing $150 for Level 1, $300 for Levels 1 & 2, and $450 for Levels 1, 2, & 3. If this seems high, keep an eye on the website–Rocket frequently offers deals with these prices listed as much as 50% off.

It’s hard to say whether or not it’s worth paying for. It could be the ideal course for some people, while others will dislike it. In my view, the pros and cons are pretty evenly balanced.

Pros

  • Lessons are structured well and use less English as you move up
  • Lots of opportunities to practice what you’ve learned
  • Lessons force you to speak out loud in Spanish
  • In-depth grammar
  • App and website both work well
  • You’ll make a ton of progress if you stick with it

Cons

  • Audio lessons are very boring
  • The constant “How do you say?” & “You should have said___” in the audio lessons
  • Cultural lessons feel lazy
  • The Rocket Reinforcement would likely become boring if you used the course long-term
  • You’d probably want to work with a tutor and get more listening practice from podcasts
  • Fairly expensive

How to Use Rocket Spanish Effectively

If you want to get the most out of your Rocket Spanish experience, check out these tips!

Set aside some time

Block out Rocket time in your calendar every day if possible, or once a week at the bare minimum. If you worry that your busy schedule won’t allow hours of study time every day, what about downloading Rocket’s half-hour audio lessons to listen to on your commute to work every morning?

Whether you want to cover the simple basics like how to order a coffee that you learn in the first few audio lessons or dive into the depths of the grammar lessons you will encounter later in the Rocket Spanish program, you will see the most progress if you work through the course in a regular, consistent manner. 

Be consistent

This is true for any Spanish you want to try out, but keep in mind that you will likely remember much more of what you study if you go for those small daily study sessions over a giant five-hour cram session once every two weeks. 

Consistency and constant repetition will help your brain build new neural connections and store Spanish words and phrases in your permanent memory Speed-studying for three hours once a week may give you a feeling of accomplishment, but chances are you won’t remember much at all a week later!

Other learning tools

If you want to get fluent fast, add other learning tools to your Spanish-learning portfolio. Flashcard tools like Memrise and Anki, mentioned earlier, in this article, will help boost your Spanish vocabulary. If you want to practice actual conversation out loud in your brand-new Spanish, try out a free conversation app like HelloTalk.

This app pairs you up with conversation partners who speak your target language. Spanish is one of the most popular languages, so you won’t have to worry about finding a good conversation partner! You and your partner can decide if you feel more comfortable in a video, text, or voice chat as you practice your language skills.

Enrichment activities

Because you may find Rocket Spanish a bit dull, you may also want to add enrichment activities to your language-learning program. Look for fun short stories in Spanish to build your literacy and translation abilities, like this collection from Storylearning’s Olly Richard. 

Search for travel documentaries or listen to podcasts about Latin America to give you a better mental picture of the culture in the countries you plan to visit someday. You could even take on a fun challenge like completing crossword puzzles in Spanish!

Reward yourself

Finally, make sure to reward yourself as you make progress! Rocket isn’t a gamified program like Duolingo, which might leave you feeling bogged down and listless partway through the course. To avoid this, set your own milestones for success. 

For example, reward yourself with a Spanish movie or TV show every time you complete a review session in Rocket. Or allow yourself a piece of candy every time you finish your daily study session. Pick a treat that works for you, but make sure to celebrate your hard work as you complete the comprehensive course!

Alternatives

There are a number of good online Spanish courses. And while Rocket Spanish is a pretty good course, it’s not my personal favorite. That honor goes to Baselang.

Baselang

Baselang is a platform where you can take unlimited Spanish classes for $149 a month. You could take five hours of classes every day and reach fluency in no time. Of course, not everyone has enough free time to really take advantage of unlimited classes. But if you can take at least a few hours of classes per week, it’s definitely worth considering. My in-depth review of Baselang.

Spanish Uncovered

If you’re interested in either story-based learning or a more challenging way to learn Spanish, you may want to check out Spanish Uncovered. The method involves interacting with text that is 100% in Spanish right from the beginning. It can be daunting, but those that are up for the challenge and have the patience to get through it will likely be rewarded.

It isn’t the cheapest option out there, but certainly worth your consideration. Here’s the full Spanish Uncovered review.

Pimsleur

Pimsleur’s lessons are somewhat similar to Rocket Spanish. The difference is that Pimsleur is much more focused on aural/verbal language while ignoring grammar. Studying with Pimsleur will probably lead to a higher level of speaking skills, but you may end up with some major gaps in understanding how the language works.

Pimsleur’s courses are extremely overpriced, but their subscription plan is good value. My full review of Pimsleur.

SpanishPod101

SpanishPod101 offers a huge library of language lessons in podcast form, plus bonus features if you subscribe via the app or online program rather than settling for the great range of free audio lessons. If you do subscribe, you gain access to lots of study tools like flashcards, word lists, and word-by-word translations of portions of the audio lessons.

If you want to take things a step further and become a Premium Plus member, you can add sessions with a personal tutor via virtual chat and classes to the bundle. The audio and video lessons have many themes ranging from emergency Spanish to Spanish for medical scenarios to Spanish for family gatherings.
We’ve tried a huge number of resources for learning Spanish. If you want to see more, read about our favorite online courses for learning Spanish, our top picks for Spanish apps, the best podcasts for learning Spanish, and some great YouTube channels for free practice.

Final Thoughts

I don’t love Rocket Spanish, but I don’t necessarily dislike it either. It’s a good course with tons of opportunities to practice what you’ve learned. The 2022 update really streamlined the interface and made it easier to work through lessons and access the survival kit tools.

There’s a nice mixture of grammar and speaking throughout the lessons, and I like how they’ve balanced these two aspects of the language.

If you’re able to stick with the lessons and complete the review activities, you’ll certainly learn a lot of Spanish.

For me, the lessons were really boring, and the review exercises got repetitive, fast. Personally, I’d have a hard time sticking with the lessons for all three levels, although that may just be a personality thing.

Lots of people seem quite happy with Rocket Spanish. Some corporations even use this program to train employees.

The good news is that Rocket offers a free trial, and you don’t need to give any payment information. You can try out the lessons and see if they’re a good fit for you.

1 thought on “Rocket Spanish Review – Boring But Still A Decent Course”

  1. In addition to the above criticism, which is all very valid; I’d add the voice recognition is terrible! I’ve tried using it for six weeks and it’s worse than any I’ve come across. Tried to get support, but their evasive and chuck out standard replies. Mostly blaming Apple?? The grammatical and verb development is awful. Very poor cultural contexting..

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