- 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
- Slow forum replies
- Spammy affiliates
Rocket Chinese is one of the better Mandarin Chinese courses, is comprehensive in its content, covering all skills, and uses high quality, natural dialogues.
NOTE: If you sign up to my mailing list, I’ll immediately send you a unique discount for Rocket Chinese that’s only available to my readers.
Rocket Chinese, part of the Rocket Languages series, has been a fairly well-known name in language learning for two decades now.
I’ve been given access to all three levels of Rocket Chinese plus the Play the Part add-on thanks to the folks over at Rocket.
The levels come packaged as three different one-time, lifetime purchase options: Level 1, Levels 1 & 2 and Levels 1, 2 & 3 (there’s no monthly subscription anymore).
Levels 2 and 3 were added years ago now and give you an additional 182 lessons on top of the 97 in Level 1 (309 all up if you add Play the Part).
Specifics on the levels can be found here:
I’ve spent some time putting Rocket Chinese under the microscope (including the latest edition) and shared my findings (some positive and some negative) with you below.
Here’s a video demonstration I put together a while back showing the interface and features of various editions (unfortunately this was before I tried the Chinese version however):
Have you used Rocket Chinese? Share your experience below in the comments.
Rocket’s also available in the following languages: Spanish (Latin American), French, Japanese, German, Italian, Arabic (Egyptian), Korean, Hindi, Russian, Portuguese (Brazilian), Sign Language (American), English and Inglés (English for Spanish speakers).
Dealing with an unfortunate lack of quality online Mandarin Chinese courses
Mandarin Chinese has the most amount of speakers in the world and is arguably the most important global business language.
It’s also desirable for a lot of people who want to travel there or teach English since jobs abound.
Yet it often amazes me that Mandarin Chinese still lacks sufficient choices of quality online resources to learn with. There have been some great innovations and niche sites pop up over recent years that I think are fantastic (e.g. ChineseClass101), but as far as comprehensive courses go, still not a lot!
Rocket Chinese is (particularly with all three levels) possibly the best structured course currently available.
I say best because as a course, it’s the most comprehensive in terms of its depth and quantity of lessons, and the natural audio quality is superb.
The lessons on reading and writing Chinese characters in Rocket Chinese
Rocket Languages is a series of 14 language editions - Chinese being one of them.
The Chinese edition is one of the six (along with Japanese, Russian, Arabic, Hindi and Korean) where teaching the written script is part of the course, and along with Japanese it’s one of the two that get the interactive draw-and-check writing tool (see below). So from the outset, I was most curious about how successfully (or not) they go about doing this.
This is not because I believe Chinese characters are vital to learning how to speak fluently (you can speak Mandarin fine without ever reading characters) but it is very important for anyone planning to migrate to China (or Taiwan) or wanting to read literature.
There are over 50,000 Chinese characters in total, most of which don’t necessarily need to be taught in a conventional course.
Characters are one of the most arduous and time-consuming aspects of learning Chinese and while there are mnemonic strategies you can employ for learning many of them, they take serious time to commit to long-term memory.
While I don’t have a total on the exact number of characters taught by Rocket Chinese, they do an excellent job breaking the characters down into digestible categories by level of difficulty.
For example, there’s a writing lesson on renting an apartment and the first character listed is:
租 (zū) - rent
They then proceed to explain that the first part of the character means ‘crop’ and this is because historically, landlords in China would take some harvested crops as their payment.
Fascinating!
Rocket Chinese is full of these explanations that really help commit characters to memory.
Drawing the characters is also demonstrated slowly using HanziWriter, which animates the stroke order of each character, and then you draw the character yourself (with your finger on mobile or the mouse on desktop) and it checks your strokes.
You’re tested on it again at the end of the lesson.
For a language where stroke order actually matters, this is super helpful and exactly what writing lessons should look like.
Level 3 goes right into advanced material too (there’s even a lesson on chengyu, the four-character idioms), so there’s a LOT of material to keep you busy.
As far as structured online audio courses go, Rocket Chinese has no competition
As I intimated above, there are some great sites out there for learning Chinese.
ChineseClass101 is one my personal favorites.
But it’s content style and delivery is completely different (unorganized video, random situational lesson topics, off-the-cuff). It’s great but it’s not a linear, structured audio course.
Rocket Chinese is, however.
Each level is made up of a few different lesson types: audio lessons (all of the dialogue lessons, delivered podcast-style with an English-speaking host plus native Mandarin speakers), Language and Culture lessons (grammar and finer cultural points), writing lessons (see above) and a Survival Kit of short vocab lessons (which used to be a paid extra but is now included in every level), with a Benchmark Test at the end of each level to gauge where you’re at.
To give you an idea of scale, Level 1 is 97 lessons across 7 modules, and Levels 2 and 3 are 91 lessons each (7 modules apiece), so 279 lessons all up, or 309 with Play the Part.
As I’ve learned over the years through my interactions here on this site and elsewhere, a lot of people desire and learn better with structure. In other words, here’s lesson one, now on to lesson two, and so on.
This doesn’t mean that you have to use Rocket Chinese this way either.
You can jump to any lesson you want on any level.
While there are practice activities at the end of each lesson to challenge you on what you’ve learned (flashcards where you rate how well you knew each card, listening and speaking where you record the phrase, writing where you type it, and a short multiple-choice quiz), you’re not obligated to pass them in order to move forward. So the great thing about Rocket Chinese is that although it does give the option of learning in a linear fashion, you can use it however you want.
But really I think it’s the quality and comprehensiveness of the dialogues that set Rocket Chinese apart from its competitors (e.g. Rosetta Stone Chinese).
You’ll only find naturally spoken Mandarin Chinese dialogues - something that’s hard to find in many other Chinese resources.
I should also note that unlike Rosetta Stone and Pimsleur (household names in language learning), Rocket Chinese uses a humorous and relaxing approach in the way it presents lessons.
The lesson hosts occasionally comment on and engage with the lesson content making it fun and interesting to learn from.
Rocket Chinese now has video role plays (this is new)
When I first reviewed Rocket Chinese it was audio and text only, which was my one consistent gripe with the whole Rocket series.
That’s changed.
Inside the Role Playing part of every audio lesson, the two speakers from the dialogue are now 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.
It’s on the audio lessons and the Play the Part lessons. The Language and Culture lessons and the Survival Kit don’t have it. 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 Chinese, every second word, or just the English.
The Rocket Chinese forum is still alive, but don’t expect a quick reply
One note I should add is regarding the forum.
Members get a Chinese learners forum as well as a general forum for everyone, where learners can help each other and request direct advice from Rocket’s tutors.
When I first reviewed the course, the Rocket Chinese forum didn’t look very active.
For example, as in the screenshot here, a learner asked a question and received a response from a tutor 3 months later.
That’s still about the going rate. The forums are moderated by Rocket’s own tutors who do reply, but on a lag of months rather than days, so treat it as a reference library more than a live help desk.
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.
One handy thing: 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.
Hopefully the situation with the forum improves as there appear to be thousands of users who I’m sure could help one another with Chinese. Of course, at the end of the day, it depends on users to want to use it in the first place.
Notes on the Rocket Chinese mobile app (iOS and Android)
Like other editions, the Rocket Languages app is my preferred choice between it and the web app.
It actually works smoother, feels nicer and in some cases even seems to load faster than the browser version.
The good thing about the app feature is that it’s totally free for everyone who purchased a course online. You can access the same content on your iOS or Android wherever you are (the audio lessons, role play videos, practice activities, flashcards, favorites and the leaderboard are all in there).
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 below).
- Certification tests are web-only. You’ll need to sit those on a computer.
And all the features from the site seem to work and display perfectly on mobile too.
Another neat feature to point out is that the voice recognition (Rocket calls it Rocket Record) works perfectly on mobile too. Under the hood it uses your browser’s built-in speech recognition by default (the Google Web Speech API) with a second engine (Deepgram) as a fallback, and Mandarin is one of the languages the fallback supports. I’ve never seen a lot of value in having software grade your pronunciation, but it’s there and it works.
The Rocket Chinese points and leaderboard system is Duolingo and Memrise-esque
I’ll make quick mention of this even though it’s not a hugely important feature.
If you’ve used Duolingo or even Memrise before, you’ll be familiar with gamified motivators that allow you to “compete” with other members.
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 study streak going so you keep coming back daily, and the points move you up a leaderboard where you can compare yourself against other Chinese learners or across all of Rocket’s languages, over the last day, week, month or year.
These keep you challenged.
It’s not something you have to do of course but if you find that friendly competition helps you study harder and more often then you’ll appreciate this feature.
Search, favorites and the certification tests
A few other tools worth mentioning while I’m at it.
Search is an in-built dictionary or glossary that allows you to search for any term or expression in English or Chinese. Search results list any instances throughout the course of that term appearing (e.g. in the middle of a sentence), and it searches the forum posts too.
Favorites is the part I like most. 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).
There are also two kinds of proper tests now on top of the per-lesson activities. Benchmark tests sit at the end of each level 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 maps its levels to the CEFR roughly as A1 to A2 for Level 1, A2 to B1 for Level 2 and B1 to B2 for Level 3. 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.
With Rocket Chinese, you own what you pay for (mostly)
Seems like an odd thing to point out, right?
But you’d be amazed how many products - especially these days with subscription-based courses becoming the norm - actually don’t give you everything you pay for.
With Rosetta Stone for example, you’re restricted by the software or online subscription limitations and can’t easily save content.
With Rocket Chinese, you pay once and you own it for life. It’s a lifetime membership, not a recurring one.
The downloads side 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 programs like 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.
With Rocket you still own what you pay for, you just have to use their app to take it with you.
Play the Part: the Rocket Chinese add-on (worth getting)
This is new since I first reviewed the course.
Play the Part is a separate add-on of 30 lessons (3 modules of 10) built entirely around role play conversations set in China: dumplings, tea, hot pot, bubble tea, temple touring, Spring Festival and so on.
Each lesson gives you a short culture note, two role play conversations (with the video role plays I described above) and vocab lists. It’s light on grammar by design so it works best once you’ve got some of the language under your belt.
It’s priced at $149.95 on its own, but you’ll be able to get it at a much lower price when adding it on to the main course package.
When you buy Rocket Chinese (or go with the payment plan), take my advice and get Play the Part.
Rocket Chinese pricing and refund policy
The pricing of the Rocket Chinese levels (one-time payment, lifetime access) is as follows:
Level 1 - $149.95
Levels 1 & 2 - $299.90
Levels 1, 2 & 3 - $449.85
Play the Part - $149.95 on its own (cheaper when bundled with the course)
If you don’t want to pay for all three levels up front, there’s a 6-month payment plan on the full bundle: six monthly payments and then it’s yours for life. There’s no ongoing monthly subscription option.
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 Chinese 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 Chinese) and I’ll send you a unique discount 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 Chinese has a generous 60 day satisfaction guarantee which means that 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 affiliates do harm to the company’s reputation
Unfortunately for some people, Rocket has developed a tainted reputation over the years because of spammers.
This is because of unrestrained partners who go around spamming YouTube with ads for Rocket Languages courses which annoys the heck out of people.
I was put off by this for years myself! And it’s still a problem today: the spammy review sites have been joined by fake YouTube “reviews” from people who have clearly never used the product.
What I learned however through my interactions with the company and using their courses is that this behavior actually has no connection to the company itself. It just can’t be easily policed.
My advice to you is to look past this nonsense and take some time to explore the product. Rocket Chinese is a high quality, legit resource despite abusive spammers.
Rocket Chinese verdict: undoubtedly the most comprehensive online Chinese audio course currently available
With all three levels and the Play the Part add-on, Rocket Chinese is certainly the most comprehensive Mandarin course you’ll find online.
Chinese is one of the editions that gets the full three levels plus Play the Part, so there’s no shortage of material.
While it may come across as slightly expensive, compared to other competitors who restrict access or have limited lesson material by comparison, it’s a no-brainer.
There are some minor issues that need polishing and improvement (the slow forum for one) but I’d be happy to recommend it due to its comprehensive content, natural dialogues, the new video role plays and detailed Chinese character lessons.
Click here to make a free Rocket Chinese trial:
Used Rocket Chinese before? Let us know what you think down below. 🙂
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Glen MacPherson
I am deeply disappointed with Rocket Chinese. The marketing for Rocket Chinese is brilliant and slick, but in my experience, the software is an abject failure. Very early on, the user faces an onslaught of new vocabulary, which stops people like me in my tracks. On Pimsleur (which has been criticized for it’s slow-moving vocabulary), the learner hears and repeats some words up to 30 times in a single lesson, and then one gets reinforcement in future lessons. For example, here we are in Module 3 in Rocket Chinese, and this is aimed at absolute beginners: “Lin: xièxie. nín de fángjiān hào shì yī wǔ líng liù hé yī wǔ líng qī. zhè shì nín de yàoshi.” Ridiculous. I tried five or six times to work through this Module and learned essentially nothing. One might think this reflects some limitation on my part, but I had little trouble getting to the B2 level in Russian. Note that I was also suckered into Rocket Russian and had a similar experience. Fool me twice, I guess.