- Comprehensive
- 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 Japanese is one of the better Japanese 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 Japanese that’s only available to my readers.
I’ve been given complete access to all 3 levels of the popular Rocket Japanese online course (plus the Play the Part add-on) for review.
As a language learning series that’s been around for over two decades now (founded back in 2004) and describes itself as a “recognized leader”, I wanted to delve into its course content, features and method to ask the question:
“Just how effective is it?”
Most importantly, I want to help you determine how well (or not) Rocket Japanese can get you speaking the language fluently.
Now I should start this by saying that my initial expectations of Rocket Japanese weren’t great - I had major issues with spammy marketers that turned me off the product for ages. I’ll explain this in just a moment.
Despite my earlier poor expectations, I am glad that I took the time to sample it.
Rocket Japanese is arguably one of the most comprehensive audio courses for Japanese available (in terms of its sheer volume of material).
In other words, there’s a tonne of content in all 3 levels of the program combined.
The lesson approach is quite different from other programs in that grammar is not explicitly taught but rather it’s demonstrated through natural audio dialogue and a podcast-style lesson format.
It uses what I refer to as the ‘chunking approach’ which means that lessons are delivered contextually in bite-size pieces making it easier to memorize. I’ll explain this below.
While pricing may be an issue for some people, there’s a big difference in value for money between Level 1 on its own (115 lessons) and all three levels together (281 lessons, or 311 with Play the Part) that is worth considering if you’re looking for a more long-term product (that much material will potentially give you years worth of Japanese content).
I’ll go into more detail about this below.
Here’s a quick video demo that I made recently of an earlier edition (now heavily improved in the newest editions) exploring the French, Spanish and Arabic versions:
The layout for Rocket Japanese is essentially the same except that the Japanese edition comes with extensive writing lessons for Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji (see below), and every audio lesson now has video role plays (also below).
Rocket’s also available in the following languages: Spanish (Latin American), French, German, Italian, Arabic (Egyptian), Korean, Chinese (Mandarin), Hindi, Russian, Portuguese (Brazilian), Sign Language (American), English and Inglés (English for Spanish speakers).
What does Rocket Japanese have to compete with anyway?
I guess I should start this by pointing out that in terms of online Japanese course material, there’s still very little competition out there for the Japanese language currently.
I’ve listed most of it on my Japanese resource page here.
This is surprising given the popularity and importance of Japanese as a tourism and business language.
With the possible exception of JapanesePod101 (which is a less comprehensive, podcast-style audio course), Rocket Japanese stands out as one of the only worthy contenders for online course options. This may change in time.
Then there are options like Rosetta Stone (see my unfavorable review here), Pimsleur and Assimil which are decent products for specific approaches and styles of learning but don’t suit those of us looking for a linear course.
Rocket Japanese is a comprehensive and structured/linear course that suits any ‘flexible’ learning style.
Spammy marketers damage the reputation of Rocket Japanese
Unfortunately.
As I mentioned above, I didn’t want to go near this product for a number of years because I was so turned off by the spammers who constantly use deceitful marketing tactics with Rocket products.
If you’ve landed here on this page after looking around for Rocket Japanese reviews, you’ve probably had to wade through a load of untrustworthy spam to get here. People trying to make a buck on a product with a generous commission scheme in place.
Thankfully, as I’ve discovered, these abuses aren’t condoned or produced by Rocket Languages.
Rocket Japanese is, as you’ll see below, a high quality language course that’s had its reputation hurt by careless marketers.
Honest disclosure on my part: I use some affiliate links on this site which means I do get a percentage on sales if I refer people to them, including Rocket Japanese. This helps me continue to provide high quality language content to my readers.
But what’s more important to me is to continue to maintain my site’s high level of trust and accuracy in the information I give.
A close look at the quality and comprehensiveness of Rocket Japanese
A quick side-by-side comparison between Rocket Japanese and a competitor like Rosetta Stone (see my review here) reveals a stark difference in comprehensiveness and quality.
Rocket Japanese teaches various levels of formality in Japanese (Rocket focuses on very formal language), and as I already mentioned, the sheer volume of content is huge in Rocket. So much so that I’m confident you could get years of value out of the full three-level package.
The audio dialogues are 100% natural Japanese - vital for improving listening comprehension skills.
The course covers areas such as sport, literature, many topics specific to Japan (e.g. Japanese addresses, formal and humble speech, おく ‘oku’ helping verb), business and more.
All accompanied by audio in natural Japanese (downloadable for offline use through the mobile app).
The course is split into three levels, and each level is made up of a few different lesson types - ‘Audio Lessons’, ‘Language and Culture’, ‘Writing Lessons’ and a ‘Survival Kit’.
1. Audio Lessons contain all of the high quality dialogue lessons delivered in a podcast-style format (an English-speaking host plus native Japanese speakers).
2. Language and Culture focuses on grammar and finer cultural points.
3. Writing Lessons teach you Japanese Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji (see below).
4. And the Survival Kit contains core lessons on vital topics in Japanese (a good place to start actually). This used to be a paid extra but it’s now included in every level.
Each level also finishes with a Benchmark Test to gauge where you’re at.
To give you an idea of scale, Level 1 is 115 lessons (that includes the full Hiragana and Katakana sets and the first Kanji lessons), Level 2 is 83 and Level 3 is 83, so 281 lessons all up, or 311 with Play the Part. That’s a lot of content.
Every audio lesson follows the same shape: the dialogue, then a role play where you take one side of it (see the video section below), 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 Rocket Japanese lessons are presented in a humorous way too unique to each language edition. This ensures that the lessons are not dull or boring and that they don’t follow a standard ‘cookie-cutter’ approach like RS or Pimsleur.
As mentioned above, Rocket Japanese’s audio content and comprehensiveness is outstanding and without any real market competition.
Rocket Japanese now has video role plays (this is new)
When I first reviewed Rocket Japanese 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 (I checked both). 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 Japanese, every second word, or just the English.
The Rocket Japanese writing lessons are for learning Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji
Rocket Japanese is one of the six editions (along with Chinese, Russian, Arabic, Hindi and Korean) that has a substantial literacy component.
And this makes sense: in order to live in Japan, do business or visit for any decent length of time, being able to read the characters is a vital skill. There are 4 types of writing in Japanese:
- Kanji (Chinese characters)
- Hiragana (phonetic spelling for Japanese words)
- Katakana (phonetic spelling for foreign words)
- Romaji (transliteration using English letters)
Rocket Japanese works through them in order within Level 1: the full Hiragana set in the first two modules, the full Katakana set in modules 3 and 4, and then Kanji from module 5 onward, grouped by topic (numbers, days of the week, family, directions, body parts, getting around and so on). Kanji gets the most attention because these characters are the most time-consuming to learn.
All up, Level 1 has 41 writing lessons (Hiragana, Katakana and the first Kanji sets) which I feel is more than adequate to learn.
The writing lessons are excellent. They use HanziWriter to animate the stroke order of each character, slowly drawing it step-by-step, and then you draw the character yourself (with your finger on mobile or the mouse on desktop) and it checks your strokes. If you keep getting it wrong, it gives you a hint.
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.
The Rocket Japanese forum is still alive, but don’t expect a quick reply
Members get a Japanese learners forum as well as a general forum for everyone.
The whole purpose of the forum is to create an active community where students can help each other or ask questions of native speakers.
When I first reviewed the course I said the Japanese forum wasn’t overly active, with questions going unanswered for months. It’s a bit better than that now. 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.
I’m sure that most people who sign up for an online course like Rocket Japanese do so because they prefer to work in isolation or at their own pace however.
Rocket Japanese comes with a free mobile app that’s as good as (if not better than) the web version
Rocket Japanese (like the other editions) comes with a free iOS and Android mobile app.
The app has pretty much everything from the web version (the audio lessons, role play videos, practice activities, flashcards, favorites and the leaderboard) but is in my opinion even nicer to use. It runs perfectly, loads faster and is an all-round pleasure to use.
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.
In fact the mobile app is so good that I can’t believe they don’t charge people to use it.
If you commute regularly, you’ll find the convenience of being able to access your Japanese course content from the app very handy.
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 Japanese 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.
Rocket Japanese: you own what you pay for (mostly)
Most other competitors restrict the way you can use their course content.
For example, Rosetta Stone Japanese can only be used in the software itself or online and you can’t save individual parts of the course to listen to later.
Two things I often say about Rocket Languages courses that I think are very important:
- It’s a lifetime membership, not a recurring membership.
- The audio lessons are downloadable for offline use (though only through the mobile app now).
Too many companies restrict access to content that consumers have already paid for.
With Rocket Japanese, you pay once and you own it for life.
The downloads point has been watered down a bit since I first reviewed the course. 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 Japanese search and favorites tools (previously ‘Saved Vocab’) and extrinsic motivators
Two nifty features that don’t get enough attention in my opinion are the Search and Favorites tools and the gamified leaderboard.
This has been through a few names over the years (it was ‘Saved Vocab’ when I first reviewed the course) and it’s now split into Search and Favorites. Functionality and appearance are a lot better than they were.
Search basically acts as a course glossary of terms and expressions where you can search for absolutely anything in English OR Japanese, and it will scan the enormous amount of course content for those terms/expressions (it searches the forum posts too).
For example, if you search “house”, you’ll get every mention of “house” in the entire course including within contextual sentences.
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).
The leaderboard is also there to help motivate you to have study streaks (similar to Duolingo or Babbel) by competing 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 streak going, and the points move you up a leaderboard where you can compare yourself against other Japanese learners or across all of Rocket’s languages, over the last day, week, month or year.
It’s a great little motivator to keep you on track with your Japanese.
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, and for Japanese it also maps them to the JLPT: Level 1 covers N5 and Levels 2 and 3 together cover N4. 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.
Play the Part: the Rocket Japanese 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 Japan: getting lost in Tokyo, temple touring, festival season, a wedding, sushi and a round of kanpai 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 Japanese (or go with the payment plan), take my advice and get Play the Part.
Rocket Japanese pricing and refund policy
The pricing of the Rocket Japanese 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 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 Japanese) 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 Japanese 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.
In summary: Rocket Japanese has a few flaws but it still stands out as the most comprehensive and useful online audio course available
Especially with all three levels (and Play the Part).
Though on the higher end of the price scale, Rocket Japanese offers potentially years of value out of a lifetime membership (also, if you’re preparing for the Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT), it’s excellent).
Japanese is one of the editions that gets the full three levels plus the Play the Part add-on, so you won’t run out of material.
A trove of natural audio dialogues, the new video role plays and a free mobile app (with offline audio) make it a no-brainer for any serious Japanese learner.
The forum is still slow and a few features could be improved but overall I’m happy to recommend it.
You can hear samples of the Rocket Japanese course here:
Ever used Rocket Japanese before? Share your thoughts below.
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2 COMMENTS
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Tom
How advanced is rocket Japanese on the cefr ratings?
John
I have studied 8 languages, tried many courses, including Rocket in 3 languages, Rosetta Stone, Pimsleur, Michel Thomas, DuoLingo, the Pod101 series, and others. The thing that keeps me going in a course is if it is enjoyable. To me, Rosetta Stone and DuoLingo are the most fun of all. Michel Thomas is very relaxing, enjoyable. It keeps me interested. Pimsleur is more intense, but very rewarding - the mild pressure of having to reply with the answer works, and I keep coming back to it. But the Pod101 series and Rocket are just not fun. They are similar, they have tons of “lessons”. But in both, the lessons just don’t work for me. They’re based on a “dialog” a sample conversation between people. The dialog is said by native speakers, then an English speaking host (usually annoyingly cheerful) explains it line by line. But this just doesn’t work for me, it doesn’t involve the listener much at all. Rocket’s newer courses do have the listener repeat things, and there’s always that “Rocket Review”, but the lessons are just too long, too slow, and I don’t remember things from them. And the other things that Rocket has added, such as hear it, say it, the little quiz - not fun. Sorry. The good thing about Rocket is that you get lots of lessons for a good price. That’s why I’ve purchased Rocket German, Arabic and Hindi. But I find myself avoiding them, even though there’s so much content. DuoLingo, Rosetta Stone, Pimsleur and Michel Thomas have some flaws, as no one course is perfect, but those are fun courses. Rocket is not. Same with Glossika. Tons of content, but it’s just so tedious. This is why I have to disagree with your review of Rocket Japanese.