Rocket Italian Review

The first lessons you'll encounter in Rocket Italian are "Interactive Audio" lessons — purely audio, podcast-style lessons. You can listen to these on your phone while you’re out and about, or doing housework, walking the dog — whatever.

(Note that the “interactive” part of the “Interactive audio lessons” really just means that the hosts pause to allow you to speak an answer out loud yourself.)

There are 29 of these lessons in each level (25 in Level 3). Each audio lesson is around 20 - 25 minutes long, giving you around 8-9 solid hours of audio lessons per level.

A lesson typically starts off with a complicated-seeming conversation on a particular topic or situation (e.g., Ordering a coffee and a pizza — lesson 1.3, Using public transport — lesson 2.1, At the dinner table — lesson 5.2). This conversation will use a lot of language that you haven't seen before, so it may seem intimidating at first.

The hosts then spend the rest of the lesson dissecting and explaining the language in the conversation. Along the way you’ll run into some important grammatical topics, explained as and when they’re needed. This is a nice way to be exposed to these rules — you'll be able to see how things work in a real-world context, which makes it a lot easier to understand.  

The lessons move at a decent pace: The Italian audio is slow and clear, but you still manage to cover a good amount of new language in each lesson. They occasionally wander off and discuss language that is related to the material in the conversation, so you pick up a good amount of extra vocabulary too.

The lessons are also (importantly) not too boring. There's a bit of (scripted) banter between the hosts, and the occasional cultural insight, which adds to the interest of each lesson. (No self-respecting Italian drinks a cappuccino after lunch! Petrol is very expensive in Italy!)

At the end of the lesson you’ll get to hear that conversation again, and you can marvel at how much easier it now seems. 

An interactive transcript gives you more learning tools

A handy feature is the interactive transcript of the conversation from the lesson. You can access this through the website or the app. All the audio examples allow you to record yourself to practice your pronunciation, and there's a challenging activity where you role-play as one of the characters. Good for practicing your recall when you're on the spot!

• They give you some practical language that you can start using immediately (starting with the usual greetings). This is good if you need a quick primer on Italian before you head on vacation, or if you just want to start enjoying using your new language quickly.
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• They also introduce you to important building blocks of Italian in a natural and enjoyable way. You'll start recognizing common constructions and patterns, without needing to sit and study the grammar. It's is a pleasant way to learn a lot of useful Italian language, especially if you don't enjoy studying grammar outright.
  

In addition to the 29 audio lessons, each level also comes with around 30 "Language and Culture" lessons.

These are essentially a traditional written Italian grammar course, where you'll learn all the various parts of the language — nouns, articles, verbs, questions, etc — but with multimedia elements to play with, and the occasional cultural aside.

These lessons strike a good balance between linguistic analysis and easier-to-get explanations: The technical stuff is all there, but it's explained in a user-friendly way — even if you don't know your adjectives from your adverbs.

If I were to make a criticism, it would be that sometimes the lessons are a little too comprehensive. It can feel like the course wanders off on too many tangents, rather than staying laser-focused on the topic at hand. Each lesson can get quite long, and will occasionally cover a couple of grammar points that I would prefer to see split out into different lessons.

But you can be assured that they’re covering everything, and it doesn’t necessarily matter if you’re not absorbing all of the digressions and exceptions at this point. It’s comforting to know that the material is there waiting for you if you need it in future. 

Both the Interactive Audio lessons and the Language and Culture lessons come with a range of interactive tools to practice what you've learned from a variety of angles — reading, listening, writing, recall and pronunciation.

Reinforcement activities include...

• Flash cards: Test your recall of vocabulary from the lesson. You can switch between having the Italian or English to be on “front” of the card, so you can use it to test both your reading comprehension and your recall. 
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• Hear It, Say It: A piece of audio from the lesson will play without any text to help you understand it. You can either repeat it back (to test your pronunciation) or try to understand and remember what it means (comprehension).
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• Write It: You hear a piece of audio, and you need to write it in Italian (to improve your writing). 
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• Know It: You see words in English and you need to come up with the Italian translation (improving your recall).  
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• Quiz: Multi-choice quiz based on the lesson.
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• Play It (Interactive Audio lessons only): Role-play as a character from the lesson dialogue. You can choose if you want to have English or Italian prompts on screen to vary the difficulty or change the focus of your study (comprehension, pronunciation, recall)
  

These activities are a worthwhile "bonus" on top of the other lessons, but they probably won't knock your socks off when it comes to entertainment factor. There are other courses out there that have slicker interactive activities (e.g., Duolingo, Babbel), but that's because that's their whole course. It's all they do. With Rocket Italian, the activities are just the icing on the cake.

A couple of minor quibbles:

• The tools for a lesson only draw from language covered in that particular lesson. You'll find that it gets a little tedious by the time you reach the fourth tool and you've been through the same 40 vocabulary words several times already. (But you'll know the material really well.)
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• You'll learn a lot of single words without any context. This can be fine for simple vocabulary, but it would be nicer to see words used in sentences, rather than sitting unnaturally alone with a bunch of notation to tell you if you're looking for the singular, plural, masculine or feminine.
  

You've seen this little red microphone sitting on all these screenshots. Let's talk about the pronunciation tools for a moment.

Rocket Italian has two pronunciation testing options built into every single audio example in the course...

• AI-assisted speech recognition: You record yourself saying a phrase in Italian, and Rocket Italian (using Google's speech recognition engine) will tell you what it thinks you said in Italian. It will highlight the parts you got right and wrong, and give you an overall score out of 100.
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• Your own ears: You can record yourself saying a phrase, and then compare it side-by-side to the sample spoken by the Italian voice artist.

If you see a piece of audio in Rocket Italian, it will have these tools. It's a HUGE library of voice examples to work with, and it will definitely get you speaking your Italian out loud.

It depends on what you're expecting from it.

• Will it tell you if you would likely be understood by a patient and forgiving Italian speaker? Yes.

• Will it tell you if your pronunciation is good? No.

If you're looking for a tool to tell you if your vowel sounds are on point, you might be disappointed. Pronunciation tools based on speech recognition technology are always likely to be very forgiving. That's because the voice recognition is trying really hard to understand you — that's its job!

But if voice recognition can understand what you're saying, then a real, live Italian speaker will probably understand you too. (And that's still pretty good.)

With Rocket Italian's automatic pronunciation checking tool, there is an "easy" and a "hard" setting. On the "easy" setting I could get perfect scores on pronunciation, even when I was speaking pretty terribly. It seemed a little bit harder on the "hard" setting but still usually manageable, even with a not-great accent.

Another way of working on your pronunciation is to simply use your own ears to compare your pronunciation to the native speaker. This isn't quite as fancy, but it can be more reliable than the speech recognition tool.

Again, kudos to Rocket Italian for letting you choose. You can play back your pronunciation attempt by pressing the red play button. Just compare it to the voice model (blue play button).

Listen for the difference. Did you get close? How could you get closer? (Don't forget, if you want to try this for yourself you can sign up for a free trial of Rocket Italian. You'll get lots of these voice examples to play with — even just in the trial version.)

I recommend using the automatic speech recognition at first, to get your mouth used to moving around Italian words. Then come back and use your own ears once you're easily and reliably scoring 100% on the hard setting.

• "Survival kits": These are lessons filled with vocabulary and useful phrases — similar to phrasebook type material. In Level 1 it covers things like family vocabulary, colors, foods, proverbs, clothing, and household items. Each lesson comes with a downloadable audio lesson, similar to the Interactive Audio lessons.
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• Community forum: You can jump in here to ask questions. Often the course tutors will be able to answer, so that's nice. It's not super lively though.
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• Points, streaks, leaderboard: There are gamification features which give you intangible rewards for using the software — if this is what floats your boat and keeps you motivated.
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There are a couple of ways you can access the Rocket Italian course and materials: 

• Through the Rocket Languages website: This is how you'll use it on a laptop or desktop computer. It's a web app, so there's nothing to download or keep updated — it's just like visiting a website.
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• Through the Rocket Languages app: On your phone or tablet you can grab this free app for iOS or Android. It syncs with your Rocket Languages account and keeps your progress updated no matter which device you're using.
  

I typically use the web app on my laptop, but the phone app works really well. You can save the Interactive Audio lessons to your phone to play when you're away from wifi — good for us who don't have unlimited data!

It is also a bit easier to use with the speech recognition and recording tools on your phone — they just work right out of the box. I used to run into issues with the security settings on my web browser when using the web app. (I'm not having problems anymore though, these may have been resolved in the current version of the program.)

• It gets you speaking and understanding Italian quickly. The Interactive Audio lessons give you a quick, easy introduction to a lot of useful language.
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• But it's also very comprehensive. The Language and Culture lessons act as a full grammar course, revealing the building blocks of Italian. It's rare to find a course that goes into this much depth. You'll also get over 2000 individual audio examples to play with in each level, which is insane.
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• It works for different learning styles. Readers, listeners, and people who learn by "doing". It works equally well for people who want to understand the rules, and people who just want to get out there and start speaking.
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• It's entertaining. I enjoy the cultural insights in both the audio lessons and the written lessons. The audio lesson conversations are often quite fun, especially in later levels. They feel natural and not overly "engineered".
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• It's not just one big gimmick. Rocket Italian isn't trying to sell you some language-learning snake oil. It's built on solid principles. It's not as flashy as some competitors, but it delivers a lot more.

• The "Language and Culture" lessons are detailed, but dry. To be fair, it's hard to make this material fun (I've tried!). The audio examples and cultural asides do help lighten things up though.
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• ‍Voice recognition pronunciation tool might be misleading. If you take a 100% score to mean "my accent is perfect", you would be mistaken. But it's a good tool if you understand what it's actually doing, and it'll definitely get you speaking out loud.
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• ‍It's missing some personality. Your experience might feel different, but to me it feels like a course that has been built by engineers and linguists. It's efficient and versatile, and the content is well-structured, but it's just missing that little bit of personality that would make it even better.

At first glance, Rocket Italian's price can seem steep. The difference is that Rocket Italian is a one-off purchase (not a subscription). You buy it once, and you own it forever.

• Each level purchased individually is $149, but there is always a coupon that will take $50 off the price.
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• Levels 1, 2, 3 purchased together gives a much larger discount. There will usually be a coupon taking about $189 off the price, bringing it down to $259.

If you purchase the full course (Levels 1, 2, 3 together) you have the option to pay it off in monthly instalments over 6 months. (Note: This is tucked away in a FAQ question on the pricing and purchase page, so it's hard to find. You need to click the link inside that question to access the monthly instalments page.)

There is a very generous guarantee on all purchases from Rocket Languages. If you don't like it, you can email their team within 60 days and they'll refund you your whole purchase. I don't see any other language courses offering this level of reassurance.

The refund rates that I've seen suggest that only 5% of people ever ask for a refund, so people are mostly satisfied with their purchase. But it's still really comforting to know you have that option.