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- 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 Russian is one of the better Russian courses, now covering all three levels, is comprehensive in its content, covering all skills, and uses high quality, natural dialogues.
There are very few good choices when it comes to online courses for learning Russian.
When I lived in Russia doing my Russian immersion in Kazan (see here), I almost exclusively relied on Earworms MBT Russian and Glossika to get me started but there just wasn’t much else beyond that (apart from a few textbooks!).
They were extremely helpful tools but weren’t courses.
Well I wish I’d known about Rocket Russian at the time.
Rocket Russian is a very comprehensive audio course for learning the Russian language.
When I first reviewed it, Rocket Russian only had one level aimed at total beginners, which put it a step behind editions like Spanish and French. That’s no longer the case. It now has all three levels (beginner, intermediate and advanced), so it’s just as useful for higher-level learners as the bigger editions. The one thing it’s still missing is the Play the Part add-on that some of the other languages get (more on that below).
Lessons are presented as podcasts but also accompanied by audio dialogues and vocabulary which suits those of us who don’t like long English explanations.
Rocket Russian makes use of what I named the ‘chunking approach’ (my own developed language learning method) which means that lessons are delivered in bite-size pieces/chunks rather than explicit grammar rules.
This makes learning more enjoyable and far less stressful (and a more natural way to learn!).
Here’s a quick video demo that I made of an earlier edition (now heavily improved in the new edition) exploring the French, Spanish and Arabic versions of Rocket Languages:
Rocket Russian is basically the same except that it includes some extensive reading and writing lessons in Cyrillic.
Rocket’s also available in the following languages: Spanish (Latin American), French, Japanese, German, Italian, Arabic (Egyptian), Korean, Chinese (Mandarin), Hindi, Portuguese (Brazilian), Sign Language (American), English and Inglés (English for Spanish speakers).
So what other options are there besides Rocket Russian?
I figure this is an important question to ask up front.
Glossika and Earworms MBT I mentioned already. These are vastly different types of resources - Glossika is a spaced-repetition tool (see my review) and Earworms is an audio phrasebook with a musical backing track (sounds odd but it’s scientifically based).
There’s also RussianPod101 which is more of a collection of podcast and video lessons.
Of course, there are alternatives like Rosetta Stone (read my review here), Pimsleur and Assimil too. These are all household names designed for specific approaches and learning but with (in my opinion) major flaws.
Rocket Russian stands out as a comprehensive and structured course that suits just about any learning style.
NOTE: I have access to a unique, exclusive offer on Rocket Russian that’s only available to my email subscribers. I don’t ever share it publicly. Subscribe by
The problem with Rocket Language’s plague of annoying marketers
I honestly avoided Rocket Languages courses for a long time because I was so frustrated by affiliate spammers and their sneaky sales tactics.
People who are trying to get rich on a product that they know nothing about. You’ve probably encountered dodgy Rocket Russian reviews all over the place before landing here (there’s a plague of them).
What I discovered is that these abuses aren’t connected with or controlled by Rocket Languages at all.
The reputation of Rocket Russian is still being hurt by careless marketers, and the spammy review sites have now been joined by fake YouTube “reviews” from people who have clearly never used the product.
Honest disclosure: In the interests of full transparency, I occasionally use affiliate links on this site which means I do get a percentage on sales for products like Rocket Russian. This helps me continue to provide high quality language content to my readers.
What’s more important to me is providing honest and trustworthy reviews on products like this one so that you can make an informed decision.
General overview of what Rocket Russian offers
Big household names like Rosetta Stone and Pimsleur are vastly different to Rocket Russian.
Both of these famous competitors work within their own rigid method and are very limited in the scope of what they actually teach. Emphasis is on getting your toes in the water with Russian but in terms of comprehensiveness and personal learning style preference, they don’t rank well.
Rocket Russian on the other hand is comprehensive and not restrictive.
You learn your way.
But the structure is there if you need it.
Rocket Russian’s audio dialogues are 100% natural Russian (it doesn’t use awkward formal language).
The course goes into detail on areas such as sport, family, Russia-specific topics, business, many topics that you typically find in a detailed phrasebook and more.
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 Russian speakers).
2. Language and Culture looks at grammar and finer cultural points.
3. Writing Lessons show you how to read and write Cyrillic (these all sit in Level 1, see below).
4. The Survival Kit contains short vocab lessons on vital topics in Russian (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 96 lessons, Level 2 is 50 and Level 3 is 48, so 194 lessons all up (that includes the Survival Kits and the Cyrillic lessons in Level 1). The Level 2 and 3 lessons are fewer but a lot longer (many run 30 to 50 minutes), so it’s not less material.
Level 2 gets into proper intermediate grammar (verb aspect, nouns in all six cases, reflexive verbs, the future tense, the imperative, passives, comparatives and idioms) and Level 3 carries on from there into things like participles, gerunds and prefixed verbs of motion.
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.
When I first reviewed Rocket Russian there was also a ‘Travelogue’ section, an 8-chapter narrative story in Russian, which was by far my favorite part. That’s gone now. Some of the other languages got a ‘Play the Part’ add-on in its place, but Russian hasn’t (yet).
What I like about Rocket Russian lessons is that they’re presented in a fairly light-hearted way. This keeps the lessons from becoming too dull or boring over time.
Rocket Russian now has video role plays (this is new)
When I first reviewed Rocket Russian 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 (I checked lessons in both Level 1 and Level 2). 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 Russian, every second word, or just the English.
The Cyrillic writing lessons in Rocket Russian are extensive
Rocket Russian is one of the six editions (along with Japanese, Chinese, Arabic, Hindi and Korean) that has a detailed literacy component.
The Russian alphabet (called Cyrillic) is a practical necessity if you plan to visit Russia so I understand why Rocket Languages has spent so much time on this.
The writing lessons all sit in Level 1 and they’re spread through the course rather than lumped together at the start. The intro module gives you an overview of the alphabet, the first module covers how to read Russian and the hard/soft and voiced/unvoiced consonant distinctions, and from there every module has three to five short lessons covering the letters one at a time and in some cases, in pairs (м and а, к and с, and so on), finishing up with the soft and hard signs, how letters link and when to use capitals.
Each letter lesson has short videos showing how to write the letter on its own and then how it’s written in a word, plus audio and sample words.
What I find interesting (and perhaps a negative point) is that they use cursive writing in these lessons.
The Rocket Russian forum is still alive, but don’t expect a quick reply
Members get a Russian learners forum as well as a general forum for everyone.
When I first reviewed the course I said the Russian forum might as well not exist, and it was pretty dead at the time. Russian 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.
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.
If you want actual interaction with Russian speakers, you’re still better off on a site like italki, and I acknowledge that most people who sign up for an online course like this one do so because they prefer to work on their own anyway.
I highly recommend the mobile app for Rocket Russian (better than the website in my view)
When you join Rocket Russian online, the iOS and Android app is included free.
In my opinion, the app is amazing and in some ways actually better than the web version.
It has pretty much everything from the web version (the audio lessons, role play videos, practice activities, flashcards, favorites and the leaderboard), runs perfectly, loads faster than the website and is a joy 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.
I’m surprised that the app is free to be honest.
For anyone who learns on-the-go while commuting, I highly recommend downloading the Rocket Russian app to your mobile or tablet.
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 Russian 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 Russian: You own what you pay for (mostly)
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).
The lifetime membership point is that while the price may seem steep up front, you have to remember that you’re not paying for a monthly or yearly service like many other sites.
In fact it’s become quite common now for online learning platforms to charge for a subscription.
With Rocket Russian, 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 search and favorites tools (previously ‘My Vocab’) and the leaderboard motivator
Oddly enough, my favorite part of the whole Rocket Russian experience is the search tool.
This has been through a few names over the years (it was ‘My 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 is an in-built dictionary or glossary that allows you to search for any term - or - expression in English or Russian. Search results list the search string + 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).
Super useful!
Especially for a language like Russian where such tools don’t currently exist.
You also have access to a leaderboard which is a gamified way to keep you motivated. 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 Russian learners or across all of Rocket’s languages, over the last day, week, month or year.
Competition is a great extrinsic motivator for language learning.
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.
Rocket Russian pricing and refund policy
Now that Russian has all three levels, it’s priced the same as the other big editions (one-time payment, lifetime access):
Level 1 - $149.95
Levels 1 & 2 - $299.90
Levels 1, 2 & 3 - $449.85
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
You can also try the course for free before buying and it doesn’t ask for a credit card.
As for refunds, Rocket Russian 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 Russian: Comprehensive and easy to use, and now with all three levels
When I initially reviewed Rocket Russian, I really hoped they’d release the next two levels, and they finally have which I’m stoked about.
It used to be a beginners-only package, which meant higher-level learners were better off with something like Glossika (you can read my Glossika review here). With Level 2 and 3 now in place it takes you well into intermediate territory and brings it in line with the bigger editions like Spanish and French. The only thing it’s still missing is a Play the Part add-on.
The forum is still slow and could be vastly improved with a few simple changes (an AI expert for quick grammar answers would be my first).
But overall, whether you’re starting out with Russian or already at an intermediate level, it’s a great find and will offer long-term value. Its natural audio dialogues, the new video role plays and a flawless mobile app (with offline audio) make it a real no-brainer.
Take a look at the free trial of the Russian course by clicking here:
Used Rocket Russian before? Share your thoughts below.
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3 COMMENTS
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Gil
Thanks for the review.
While I’m interested in Rocket Languages, the price is very steep - and I don’t like not being able to buy individual levels, or a mix of levels e.g. I don’t really need level 1 in German, but there’s no option to buy levels 2 and 3 either individually, or as a package.
But really, it’s the price that makes me hesitate.
Agnes Nindya
Hello Donovan. I feel so lucky coming across your article. Thank you for thoroughly writing on Russian learning programs. I’m currently looking for Russian program/app for my 11 year old daughter. A bit on background.... We are Indonesians, living in Jakarta. We had spent 1.5 years living in Kyrgyzstan 7 years ago, where my daughter learnt her first conversational foreign language, Russian. She learnt it from her nanny and then in preschool there. Back in Jakarta, she still went to Russian kindergarten for a year. According to Russian speaking community back then, she had very good pronunciation. Yet after kindergarten she has been more immersed in English aside from our native language. There was not any Russian course/club in which children can learn here. Passion to learn Russian comes back to her now, and she is ready to learn by herself. So, referring to your article, Rocket Russian is the best. Is it still the best considering my daughter’s background? Any opinion regarding this subject will be very much appreciated. Thank you.