- Egyptian dialect focus
- Comprehensive courses
- High quality dialogues
- Video role plays on every dialogue
- Lifetime access with a 60 day refund grace period
- Free mobile app access included
- Downloadable audio (app-only)
- Inbuilt gamification and leaderboard
- Slightly pricey
- Only one level available
- Slow forum replies
- Spammy affiliates
Rocket Arabic is a superb Arabic course that teaches the Egyptian dialect, and I recommend it because of the comprehensiveness of its content and the high quality of its dialogues.
NOTE: If you sign up to my mailing list, I’ll immediately send you a unique discount for Rocket Arabic that’s only available to my readers.
I recently had the opportunity to try out and sample the Arabic edition of the well-known Rocket Languages series.
This series has been around since 2004 (over two decades now) and since I have expertise in the Arabic language, I like to test the effectiveness of as many courses and books for Arabic as I can.
So I was more than happy to sit down and comb through Rocket Arabic.
Now, I should note from the outset that unlike some of the other language editions, Rocket Arabic at this time only provides Level 1 (other languages like Spanish have 3 levels, and Russian got its extra levels a while back but Arabic hasn’t yet). It also doesn’t get the Play the Part add-on that some of the other editions do.
This means that the course might not be suitable for some Intermediate+ learners. If you are looking for something more challenging then I’d recommend TalkInArabic.com as an alternative.
What Arabic has picked up since I first reviewed it is video role plays in every audio lesson, which I’ll cover below.
As you’ll read below, I’ve put Rocket Arabic under the microscope so that I can share my overall impression with you.
Here’s a video demonstration that I put together a while ago (an earlier version which has since been significantly improved):
If you’ve used Rocket Arabic, make sure to comment below!
Rocket’s also available in the following languages: Spanish (Latin American), French, Japanese, German, Italian, Korean, Chinese (Mandarin), Hindi, Russian, Portuguese (Brazilian), Sign Language (American), English and Inglés (English for Spanish speakers).
Note: Rocket Arabic’s undeserved reputation
This is important.
Rocket Languages doesn’t have the greatest reputation with bloggers like myself.
And through no fault of their own.
They’ve had an issue for a long time with unrestrained marketing partners who spam websites and YouTube with phony ads and recommendations to make a profit. There are still loads of sneaky “review” sites that you’ve no doubt had to sift through to get here, and they’ve now been joined by fake YouTube “reviews” from people who have clearly never used the product.
For this reason, I refused to review Rocket Arabic for a long time (even tweeting this out at one point years ago):
Anyone leaving links to Rocket language products on my site are instantly banned. Constant spam from their affiliates. @rocketlanguages
Fortunately, this has nothing to do with the company itself.
They just have poor control over their marketing partners who abuse the system and get away with it.
So word of caution: don’t believe every gleaming recommendation you read online.
The difference between Rocket Arabic and Talk In Arabic
I mentioned TalkInArabic.com already.
I should add a disclaimer here to say that this is our resource for learning spoken Arabic (8 different varieties).
But I have actually had questions from people before asking me what the difference is or which one is more suitable for specific learner types.
The truth is: they’re very different resources.
Rocket Arabic teaches one specific spoken dialect (Egyptian) and it’s also a very linear audio course.
In other words, it assumes that you’ll go from Lesson 1 to Lesson 2 to Lesson 3 - right through to the end. The course doesn’t restrict you if you don’t want to do this but it’s intended for that purpose.
TalkInArabic.com on the other hand covers 8 spoken dialects (Egyptian, Levantine, Iraqi, Tunisian, Algerian, Moroccan, Saudi and Sudanese), and is a non-linear resource - you learn how you want with constantly-updated audio and video material.
Every week, there are new lessons added.
With Rocket Arabic, although comprehensive and improving every year, it’s not a dynamic resource (not updated frequently).
That’s the difference in a nutshell.
On the issue of Arabic dialects and Rocket Arabic
I mentioned that Rocket Arabic teaches spoken Egyptian.
This is the most well-known and widely-understood dialect of Arabic due to the majority of media being of Egyptian origin.
If you travel anywhere in the Arabic-speaking world and use Egyptian, people will generally understand you without a problem.
Important point: This doesn’t mean that you will understand them however.
But this is a valuable selling point for Rocket in my opinion.
They teach a spoken, natural variety of Arabic unlike so many other courses and books which teach Modern Standard Arabic, a dialect that nobody anywhere speaks as a native language.
Rosetta Stone for example teaches the standard dialect (making it a useless product).
Don’t make the mistake of learning MSA first if you plan to communicate.
Rocket will get you speaking natural Egyptian.
Rocket Arabic’s reading and writing lessons have been overhauled (and done properly this time)
Rocket Arabic spreads its literacy lessons through all 7 modules of the course rather than lumping them together at the start.
The course opens with a full introduction to the alphabet (all 28 letters plus hamza, the short vowels, and which letters connect and which don’t) and then works through the script letter by letter, with three or four dedicated writing lessons in every module (Alif, Bih and Tih in the first module, right through to Yih and hamza in the last).
While not essential for speaking, reading Arabic script is actually a lot easier than most people think and will simplify your travel to the Middle East as you’ll be able to better read signs and menus.
Plus a lot of quality Arabic books for learning are written solely in Arabic script.
When I first reviewed Rocket Arabic, my complaint was that the writing lessons had lots of potential but just weren’t explanatory enough for new learners. The videos demonstrating how to write were only a few seconds long, and in many of the lessons the new words were given but you weren’t actually shown how to write them until the following lesson as a review.
That made no sense to me at all.
I’m glad to say this has been fixed properly.
The short videos of a teacher’s hand writing each letter are still short, but there are a lot more of them now and they’re attached to the letter being taught rather than tacked on a lesson later. Each one comes with audio pronunciation and sample words showing how the letter connects.
The one thing Arabic still doesn’t get is what the Chinese and Japanese editions have: an interactive stroke animation where you draw the character yourself and have it checked. For an alphabet of 28 letters that matters a lot less than it does for thousands of characters, so I don’t hold it against them.
The writing tests are good too. Even for Arabic, it does a really accurate job of detecting the correct and incorrect spelling of words you type (marking the correct letters in green and the wrong letters in red).
As far as linear online audio courses go, Rocket Arabic stands out
I already mentioned our site, TalkInArabic.com.
There’s also another similar site which is primarily for Moroccan Arabic called ArabicPod101.
At present neither of these are linear courses.
But Rocket Arabic is.
As I already intimated, you don’t have to use Rocket as a linear course but for those who prefer to be held by the hand and walked through the course from start to finish, it does just that.
You also have the option to be tested.
So the good thing about Rocket Arabic is that it leaves you with options.
Although the course only provides Level 1 at this time, it’s still a very comprehensive platform that covers a lot of relevant material.
As someone who is fluent in Egyptian Arabic, I can vouch for the quality of the natural recordings (I wrote about how to learn Arabic before).
They’re presented in a fun, slightly humorous way too.
Every audio lesson now has video role plays (and Rocket Record for your pronunciation)
Every audio lesson follows the same shape: the main lesson podcast (an English-speaking host plus native Egyptian speakers), then the Role Playing section, the lesson vocab, an ‘expert tip’ from the host, and finally five practice activities: flashcards (spaced repetition style, where you rate how well you knew each card), listening (hear the phrase, then record it), writing (hear the phrase, then type it), speaking (record the phrase) and a short multiple-choice quiz.
The role plays are where the big change is since I first reviewed the course: they’re now on video.
The two speakers from the dialogue are filmed (vertical, phone-style clips) and you watch them deliver the conversation one line at a time. You can Watch the Full Conversation to see it play through, or Talk To one of the characters, which means you take one side of the dialogue and record yourself while the other speaker responds on video.
This isn’t a video course in the sense of a teacher standing in front of a camera giving you a 20 minute lesson. The podcast-style audio is still the core of every lesson. But it makes the dialogues feel a lot less like a listening drill and a lot more like an actual exchange with a person. There’s an Audio only mode toggle if you’d rather skip the video, and you can set how much text you see under it: the full Arabic, every second word, or just the English.
In addition to all this, you can scroll down and listen to the individual sentences and additional vocabulary, or use the record feature to test your pronunciation. Rocket calls this Rocket Record: under the hood it uses your browser’s built-in speech recognition (the Google Web Speech API). Some of the other editions get a second engine (Deepgram) as a fallback but Arabic doesn’t, so you’ll need Chrome or Safari for it to work at all (Rocket says outright that Arabic recording isn’t supported on Firefox or Edge).
The Language and Culture lessons don’t offer these podcasts and video conversations, but instead give you scenario sentences and dialogues to listen to and practice (with the same practice activities at the end).
Imagine actually owning what you pay for - Rocket Arabic is downloadable (mostly)
This might seem like an odd thing to highlight.
But in the age of Internet subscriptions for everything (both TalkInArabic.com and ArabicPod101 are subscription based), Rocket Arabic is a lifetime, one-payment product.
You buy it, you own it for life.
The downloads point has been watered down a bit since I first reviewed the course though. Back then, every bit of audio was downloadable as MP3 files straight from the web dashboard, along with printable PDF lesson notes. The PDFs disappeared a while ago and now the MP3 downloads have gone from the web app too.
That’s unfortunate. Downloading MP3s from the website was one of the things that set Rocket apart from Duolingo and Rosetta Stone and it felt like you actually owned the content you paid for.
The good news is that you can still download the audio lessons through the mobile app (Android and iOS) for offline listening, so commutes and flights are still covered. You just can’t pull the files onto your computer anymore. For the Language and Culture lessons, Print to PDF from your browser works fine if you want them saved locally.
You still own what you pay for, you just have to use their app to take it with you.
The Rocket Arabic forum is still alive, but don’t expect a quick reply
Members get an Arabic learners forum as well as a general forum for everyone.
The whole purpose of the language forums is to foster community and encourage discussion among other learners. It’s also so the native speakers can answer questions.
When I first reviewed the course I said the Arabic forum was one of the inactive ones, and it was pretty quiet at the time.
Arabic is still one of the quieter Rocket forums, but the forums are moderated by Rocket’s own tutors who do reply, on a lag of months rather than days, so treat it as a reference library more than a live help desk. The main search tool in the app searches the forum posts too, so you’ll often find your question already answered without needing to post.
It would be far better, in my opinion, to have an AI expert built in to this, so that instead of waiting months for a reply, you get an instant answer - especially if it’s a simple grammar question.
When it comes to language learning, community makes an enormous difference to one’s outcome (see the italki community for example).
For some people, the forum may be all they have.
Tools: Search, Favorites, the leaderboard and (if you’ve used Duolingo or Memrise) the gamified features
I already mentioned the forum above which is a bit slow but there are a few other tools that are done right in my opinion.
That is: Search and Favorites (what used to be called ‘My Vocab’), and the leaderboard.
One of my favorite features of Rocket Arabic is in fact the Search tool which is basically a dictionary that looks up any word - English or Arabic - in the course and displays its various contexts and usages (it searches the forum posts too).
You can then listen to the word or dialogue sentences demonstrating how to use that word.
It’s remarkably useful.
Favorites is the other half of it. Every phrase in every lesson has a little heart icon next to it and anything you heart goes into your Favorites list, where it gets its own set of flashcards, listening, writing and speaking drills. So you can build a personal practice deck out of whatever you’re struggling with, without leaving the lesson. There’s also a Custom Flashcards tool if you want to build your own sets from scratch (or use sets other members have made public).
Gamified motivators which let you “compete” with other learners are a feature you see on sites like Duolingo and Memrise, and Rocket Arabic has them too.
You get points for every lesson and activity you complete (and for posting in the forum), with a daily goal of 400 points that you can hide if it annoys you. Hitting your goal each day keeps your streak going (much like Duolingo), and the points move you up a leaderboard where you can compare yourself against other Arabic learners or across all of Rocket’s languages, over the last day, week, month or year. This is a way to compete with other members.
While not a core feature, this is important for some people. It can make a big difference.
Healthy competition and a sense of satisfaction gained by completion is a nice touch that Rocket Arabic has.
There are also two kinds of proper tests now on top of the per-lesson activities. A Benchmark test sits at the end of the course to give you a rough gauge of where your ability is at, and certification tests live under the Tools menu (web only, not in the app), one for every module, which you unlock once you’ve finished that module. Rocket’s own claim is that completing all of a Level 1 course’s certification tests puts you at roughly CEFR A2. Take that with a grain of salt though: a test set and marked by the same course you’re studying is never the same as a real CEFR exam, but as a way of checking the material actually stuck it’s a useful addition.
The Rocket Arabic mobile app is simple yet elegant (iOS and Android)
I actually prefer the mobile app for Rocket Arabic personally.
It’s included free as part of the purchase and provides another way to access the same content while on the move.
The lesson material is identical (audio lessons, video role plays, practice activities, flashcards, favorites and the leaderboard are all in there) but in my opinion the app feels smoother and seems to load faster than the browser version at times.
I just like being able to drive or lay in bed and listen to the Arabic lessons.
There are only two real differences between the app and the website that you need to know about:
- Audio downloads are app-only. If you want the lessons offline for a commute or a flight, this is where you download them (see above).
- Certification tests are web-only. You’ll need to sit those on a computer.
Rocket Record (the voice recognition) works on the app too.
All the core features from the site work and display perfectly on iOS and Android.
Rocket Arabic pricing and refund policy
Since Rocket Arabic is a single level with no add-ons, the pricing is simple (one-time payment, lifetime access):
Rocket Arabic - $149.95
There used to be a monthly subscription option as an alternative to buying outright but that’s gone. The only instalment option Rocket offers now is a 6-month payment plan, and that’s only on the three-level bundles for languages like Spanish, so it doesn’t apply to Arabic.
The best deal by far is the family discount. If someone in your household already owns a course, Rocket will sell a second copy (with its own login and progress) at 60% off. You have to arrange it through their support team rather than at checkout.
Periodically throughout the year, Rocket Arabic runs special promotions or sales which are good to look out for but these are unpredictable.
NOTE: You can also sign up to my mailing list (select Arabic) and I’ll send you a unique discount for Rocket Arabic immediately that’s only available to my readers.
You can also try the course for free before buying and it doesn’t ask for a credit card.
As for refunds, Rocket Arabic has a generous 60 day satisfaction guarantee meaning you have two months to request a refund if you’re unhappy. One caveat: that only applies if you buy through the website. If you buy inside the iOS app, you’re under Apple’s refund policy instead, which is roughly two weeks, so buy on the web.
Rocket Arabic currently only offers one level but it’s comprehensive enough to provide real value
And the fact that it covers Egyptian Arabic rather than Modern Standard puts it light years ahead of competitors like Rosetta Stone.
Not every Rocket language gets the same number of levels and add-ons, and Arabic is one of the ones that still has just Level 1 and no Play the Part, so intermediate and advanced learners will outgrow it (that’s where TalkInArabic.com comes in).
Rocket Arabic may appear slightly expensive for a digital product but compared to its competitors who restrict access or limit lesson material, it provides value.
The comprehensiveness of the lessons, the overhauled writing lessons, the new video role plays and the natural high quality of the Egyptian dialogues outweigh the few negative points I’ve listed above. The slow forum is something I can look past.
Click here to make a free Rocket Arabic trial:
Already familiar with Rocket Arabic? What did you think?
Comment below.
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3 COMMENTS
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Jimmy
Thank you so much for these reviews. I’ll keep reading what you write elsewhere. I would be interested in knowing of a well-respected program like this but more focused on Levantine Arabic. Thanks again, and I hope Icelandic is going well
Ajamu Muhammad
Hi I’m looking to learn Arabic to help communicate better with my wife’s family. I’m wondering if this level 1 Egyptian version will enable me to hold a conversation/interact with her families Arabic speakers. Thanks!
Donovan Nagel
Level 1 of Rocket Arabic will set a good foundation but you should combine it with native speaker practice (use italki), and a supplementary/higher level resource like Talk In Arabic.