RocketFrenchReview.com

Rocket French has been changed or updated. Although the content hasn’t really changed the way that the student uses it has. It is hoped that this will improve the learning experience and thus the ability of the student to learn French. The updated course is known as the Rocket French learning lounge. This article will go over the changes and decide if the course has been improved with the new format.

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Take A Look At The Learning Lounge

The name of the new course is a good indication of how the course has changed. You will find that the content is not different. As far as I can see it is pretty much the same. However the way you use this content has changed.

The creators want you to spend more time at the site. It is a lounge where you hang out and learn to speak French. Or maybe a language school where you can take the classes but also mix with the teachers and fellow students.

In it’s original form, the Rocket French course was downloaded to your desktop and then you could do what you wanted with it. So you could copy the mp3 audio lessons to an ipod or mp3 player and listen to the lessons whenever you wanted. You would download the pdf grammar books/lesson guides and educational games to your computer and open them up whenever you wanted to learn a bit of French.

The emphasis was very much about making it easy for you to learn but leaving the motivation and responsibility for learning up to you. This is fine in theory but I think most people need a little more teaching and inspiration from time to time, especially when they are struggling or feel out of their comfort zone.

So the learning lounge was created, I believe, to rectify these issues. Although the course material is the same, the learning lounge now offers more feedback about how a student is progressing.

Getting feedback helps to motivate a student and is an objective way to tell the student what they need to focus on. The learning lounge has multiple choice quizzes with each lesson. The student is encouraged to take the quiz at the end of the lesson. The answers are marked by the system and a score is returned. If the student passes the quiz, he/she can decide to progress onto the next lesson.

Keep Track Of Your Progression In The Course

There are two stages. The first stage is French basics. The second stage  is more advanced and focuses on cultural aspects of France and more everyday situation where you will be speaking French. It consists of 5 lessons. Each stage has a certification test. This is a 100 question multiple choice test that covers all the lessons that have been covered in the stage. This test is quite tough and passing it will give you a great sense of achievement. It will no doubt give you more confidence that you are making progress and inspire you to go onto the next stage or take your learning onto the streets and start speaking to people (if you are in France or some other French speaking country of course)

I think this feedback aspect of the Rocket French learning lounge is a great improvement on the original course. Logging in and going through the lessons and taking the quizzes gives the student some structure. This is often lost when the student has to take this responsibility onto their own shoulders. So this is good and is more like a student/teacher relationship.

The Rocket French learning lounge still has the forum so that you can interact with other students or ask questions. It still has the three educational games – megaaudio, megaverb and megavocab. You still  download the games to your desktop and run them as per the original course. You can also download the audio files within the learning lounge but I was only able to download one lesson at a time which might be a tad tedious if you plan to download them all.

The Rocket Languages team try to constantly improve the course and give students better tools to help them learn their chosen language. One new tool is the Rocket Record system that comes with all the audio components of the course.

Rocket Record lets you record your voice and then play it back against the voice of a native speaker. There is a bar graph sort of graphic that shows you how your pronunciation compares to the native speaker. Presumably you continue to practice saying the words and phrases until your bar graph looks similar to the native speaker.

It’s a nice idea and this tool is used on many other learn French course but personally I think you learn pronunciation by looking at native speakers speak – how they move their lips and tongue etc.

In general I think the learning lounge concept has improved the Rocket French course. It makes your French learning more structured and can motivate you by giving feedback. These changes should help you get more value out of your self study course.

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