Whether you plan to compete in today’s global market or simply want to try something new, speaking Japanese is an essential language skill to acquire in the modern world. Spoken primarily in Japan as the national language, approximately 120 million people speak Japanese as a first language.
Written Japanese uses the Chinese characters (kanji), and much of its compound words (made of 2 or more characters) were originally derived from Chinese.
Mostly a phonetic language, Japanese does not use any articles, nouns do not have a masculine or feminine connotation, and verbs are generally only conjugated for tense. Sentence structure is also topic-comment format, which can be a bit confusing as the ‘topic’ is not always the ‘subject.’
If you are ready to give learning Japanese a shot, and are shopping around for the program that fits you best, continue reading to check out our comprehensive Rocket Japanese review below.
Rocket Japanese Review: Summary
Price: Available for a one-time lifetime payment of $149.95 for Level 1, $299.90 for Levels 1 & 2, and $449.85 for Levels 1, 2 & 3. They also offer a free trial as well as a 6-month payment plan of $75/month for their 3-level bundle package. You may be able to find coupons and they have a generous 60-day refund policy.
Description: The award-winning Rocket Languages brings you Rocket Japanese for students of Japanese. The company promises (and mostly delivers) a powerful language-learning platform with practical lessons that are proven to work. Boasting their Mastery Method, Rocket Japanese builds on research of those who speak more than one language and actual science to effectively teach Japanese.
In a Nutshell: The course is well-structured, comprehensive and thorough, covering everything you need from writing to culture. Though expensive, the authentic dialogues and fully downloadable audio lessons are invaluable for any serious learner of Japanese, providing years of progression through the 3 difficulty levels.
Quality of Learning Materials:
Quantity of Lessons:
Effective and Efficient:
Teaches Useful Phrases:
Price:
Overall Score: 3.6
Pros
- Comprehensive course that covers all aspects of the Japanese language and works on every skill concurrently (except reading)
- Enough content to last years
- Covers all of the Japanese writing systems (Kanji, Hiragana, Katakana & Romanji)
- Focuses on real authentic dialogues with native speakers
- Use of flashcards, voice recognition and other engaging learning tools
Cons
- The lessons can be slow and very English heavy (during the interactive audio lessons)
- There’s no practice drills when it comes to writing
- The learning method is heavily memorization based which is an outdated learning technique that doesn’t suit everyone and gets boring quickly
- The speech recognition software is a great idea but the technology is far from perfect
- It's quite expensive - other courses exist for much cheaper (see competitors)
Rocket Japanese Review: Overview
So is Rocket Japanese really worth your time and money?
First, let’s dive right into how the course works. You can try everything out for yourself free of charge for the first 7 days by only giving them your email. You’ll have access to the first few lessons of each level to try out for yourself.
Initially, you’ll be taken to the main dashboard where you’ll find Levels 1-3 (beginner to advanced). Clicking on each level will reveal the 3 lesson types and survival kit, which are:
- Audio Lessons
- Language & Culture Lessons
- Writing Lessons
You can filter out a specific lesson type by clicking on one of them, otherwise you can access the full course on the left and scroll through all the different modules. There are 21 modules in total, spread evenly across the 3 levels – an enormous 380 hours of lesson time. Let’s have a look at each lesson type in more detail.
The Pros: Good Points Of Rocket Japanese
The efficiency and flexibility of the program won it major points with us. Here’s what we liked best:
Pro #1: Mobile and Desktop Applications
We like that Rocket Japanese has a well-developed app for learning on-the-go. This allows you to listen to your lessons while stuck in traffic or on the subway. When you are at home or on break at the office, you can use the desktop platform.
Pro #2: Short and Flexible Lessons
If you’d like to review the vocabulary list before starting the lesson, no problem! Rocket Japanese allows you to completely customize your learning experience. You can even download PDF files to study offline at your convenience. The learning tools that accompany the lessons are innovative, enabling you to both speak with and listen to native speakers.
Pro #3: Balances All Skill Types
We love how the program is divided into Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced lesson types, allowing you to practice in a varied and engaging way. This helps prevent boredom by mixing things up when you’d like a change.
Pro #4: Covers Kanji, Hiragana, Katakana & Romanji
Unlike other language programs, Rocket Japanese covers all the Japanese writing systems, including Hiragana and Katakana. You can also toggle the writing systems on and off as needed. The different lesson types introduce the writing system from the very beginning, which helps to tie everything together.
Pro #5: Great Customer Support
Once you commit to a lifetime membership, you can be confident that the program is going to continually improve and grow. Rather than a stagnant course, it’s more of an encyclopedia with content and new updates being added all the time. The support team is available through chat to answer any questions and are generally very responsive and helpful.
The Cons: Bad Points Of Rocket Japanese
There were a few things we didn’t love about Rocket Japanese. Here’s what stood out to us:
Con #1: Too Much Time Spent on Explanations
A portion of the lesson is spoken in Japanese, followed by an explanation in English. These explanations can be a little wordy and include corny jokes — so if you don’t share the humor, it can be frustrating. Users have reported being distracted by this and forgetting the previous section they just learned in Japanese.
Con #2: Slow Pace, Too Much English
Again, the audio lessons are far from perfect. We found the pace to be on the slow end, and unfortunately many learners might get bored before finishing the lesson. Most of the audio explaining all the content is in English. While this helps with clarification, it’s important for language learners to be immersed within the language as much as possible, so we’d like to see more content in authentic Japanese.
Con #3: Rocket Record Barely Works
The idea behind the voice recognition technology is great, however it doesn’t seem to work properly and isn’t very useful. We tested it out by making basic deliberate errors and it still gave us a score of 100, and likewise a perfect pronunciation sometimes gets a score of 50 or less for no reason. Despite this, it can still be very useful as a means of comparing your pronunciation alongside a native speaker.
Con #4: Inactive Forum
We found many of the articles to be quite old and many posts were left unanswered. This means that there are either not a huge number of learners using the forum or that there is a more preferable forum elsewhere for students to ask questions and share ideas. This is a shame since the forum could be an excellent resource if kept up-to-date with an active community of learners.
Con #5: Memorization-Heavy
All of the practice activities and drills rely solely on memorization, a learning method that doesn’t work for everyone. If you complete all the lessons and exercises, you will undoubtedly develop a strong understanding of Japanese, progressing well on your way to fluency. However, the heavy focus on memorization may lead to boredom.
Other courses use clever mnemonic devices, songs, stories, and videos to reinforce what you’ve learned. Unfortunately, Rocket Japanese feels somewhat old-fashioned in this regard, relying too heavily on brute force memory tactics.
What are the Lessons Like?
Each lesson type focuses on a different aspect of the language and they alternate throughout the course, keeping everything fresh and interesting.
1) Audio Lessons
The first type of lessons focuses specifically on listening and speaking skills, centered around an authentic everyday conversation. You are provided with an audio track in which the tutor breaks down the dialogue and reviews previous content while introducing new vocabulary and phrases. They can vary in length from 15 to 40 minutes and can be streamed or downloaded.
Next you have the ‘Role Playing’ feature, which is designed to help you practice having an authentic conversation in Japanese. You select one of the characters to act as in the conversation and say only their parts of the dialogue, which are recorded and graded based on accuracy. You can also just first listen to the conversation in its entirety before giving it a try yourself.
There is also a Lesson Vocabulary section featuring a variety of Japanese words and phrases, which you can save and use to continue practicing and perfecting your reading and pronunciation.
2) Language & Culture Lessons
These lessons delve deeply into grammar, breaking down how the language works step-by-step and providing you with the building blocks to construct your own sentences (which is essential for a unique language like Japanese). There are audio examples and plenty of Japanese cultural elements included, such as foods, greetings, and holidays, to keep you fully immersed.
We like the ‘Action Replay’ section at the bottom which nicely summarizes everything in the lesson.
Below that, you’ll find the Culture lesson, which teaches you about Japanese traditions, culture and history. For example, you’ll learn all about the origin of the Japanese characters, Japan’s strict respect culture, and eating etiquette.
3) Writing Lessons
The writing lessons gradually introduce you to the Japanese script, starting with Hiragana, then Katakana, and finally Kanji characters. There is an interactive Kanji Writing Tool that demonstrates how to write each character and also allows you to practice writing them yourself.
4) Activities
Finally the reinforcement activities are at the end of every lesson where you’ll find:
- Flashcards: Translate between Japanese & English, rating each word on how difficult you found it.
- Listening: Similar to flashcards, you hear a word in Japanese and then record yourself repeating it, which is graded. You then rate the difficulty of the word as ‘Easy’ or ‘Hard’.
- Speaking: This one is a bit trickier, as you’re only given the word in English and must translate it to Japanese from memory. If you can’t remember, you can click the ‘Reveal’ button at the bottom to see the answer.
- Quiz: Multiple choice questions to test what you’ve learned.
There’s also some extra testing tools for characters that might not have been covered in the lesson. These are:
- Composing (Kana): You first listen to the phrase in Japanese and then sort the characters into the correct order.
- Composing (Kanji): You also listen to a Japanese phrase and sort the characters but in Kanji.
5) Survival Kit Lessons
The survival kit lessons aren’t really lessons at all but rather lists of useful vocab and phrases. You can dip into them at any time since unlike the other lessons they don’t build upon each other.
Extra Features & Learning Tools
There are a few other handy features that are built directly into the program to aid you in your learning and keep you motivated during your studies.
Firstly, you can save a word or phrase at any time during the lessons using the ‘Save to Vocab’ tool (you simply highlight a word and select ‘+ Save’). All of the saved items will appear in your toolkit for you to review at any time. You can also add notes to any item. Once you’ve highlighted a word, the program will also suggest similar phrases that you can add, as well.
It’s nice to see that they’ve included a leaderboard that displays your current position, how many daily points you’ve earned by completing lessons, and your current learning streak – just like in Duolingo, for example. This is a great way to keep you motivated and build a regular study habit. You can see your progress visually in a handy graph.
Finally, there’s a forum for students to post their own articles or ask questions about their learning or anything to do with the Japanese language. We found lots of interesting topics like how covid has affected people’s learning, interesting words found only in the Japanese language, and beautiful places to visit in Japan.
What’s New In Rocket Japanese For 2024?
Since 2019, when we wrote our original review (in the sections below), there have been some pretty big updates to Rocket Japanese in 2020 and 2021.
Here are some of the most notable updates:
- New Language and Culture lessons for Level 1 which are written to JLPT N5 requirements (N4 and N3 have also been promised for the coming months)
- New writing lessons that cover hiragana, katakana and N5 kanji
- A new kanji practice utility: Draw It!
- New Survival Kit lessons for Level 1 covering N5 vocabulary
- Updated notations and translations in Level 1 to make lessons even clearer
- Sort It! Kana and Sort It! Kanji have replaced Write It! in the Reinforcement activities
- A new tutorial in the Dashboard (“Find out how everything works!”)
- A Rocket Japanese "Play the Part" series that teaches users practical, everyday conversation skills, with cultural tips mixed in
- A fully-updated, more user-friendly desktop version of Rocket Japanese
We were able to test out the new features and were impressed with the time and thought that they’ve put in.
It seems like they’ve listened to past criticism and specifically improved those aspects. For example, improving the notations and literal translations, and making sure the level components correspond to levels on the JLPT. These are the biggest improvements in our opinion.
The Draw It Kanji practice function (screenshot below) is also a welcome improvement, and works well if you’re studying on a tablet or mobile. That said, it’s not really workable if you study with a regular laptop and trackpad.
Who Is Rocket Japanese For?
Rocket Japanese is recommended for anyone who:
- wants a comprehensive, all-in-one resource to learn Japanese from scratch
- wants to get ahead in business by expanding to Japan
- wants to be conversational for an upcoming vacation or business trip
- enjoys learning at their own pace
- thrives on independent study
Who Is Rocket Japanese NOT For?
Language learning software is hardly a one-size-fits-all investment. Those who might not benefit from a program like Rocket Japanese include those who:
- are visual learners (this course is mostly geared toward listening)
- thrive more in classroom environments
- cannot afford the initial investment and would do better on a monthly subscription
Rocket Japanese vs. The Competition
You can find quite a few free and subscription-based programs that claim to quickly and effectively teach you to speak Japanese. Which ones are worth the hype and how does Rocket Japanese compare? Let’s take a look at some competitors.
Rocket Japanese vs. JapanesePod101
One of the most well-known language learning programs, and probably one of the first you’ll find during your research, is JapanesePod101. It is set up very much like Rocket Japanese with immersive learning from a logical standpoint that builds upon previous lessons.
They break down their syllabus into individual lesson ‘pathways’ that each focus on a different topic or skill. The lessons are audio or video based, following a similar structure to Rocket Japanese, with authentic dialogue, vocabulary lists, cultural insights, and a grammar bank.
Both programs offer substantial content with mobile apps and desktop versions, so you can learn anywhere. The biggest difference between the two is that JapanesePod101 has a monthly subscription service instead of one-time payment.
Rocket Japanese vs. FluentU
FluentU takes a unique approach to language learning by adding subtitles and interactive captions to mostly YouTube videos. While this can certainly be entertaining, comprehensive content with grammar lessons is lacking. There is no real structure to this approach and though it could definitely be used as a secondary program, it really isn’t suited for beginners seeking fluency. FluentU also charges on a monthly or yearly basis.
Rocket Japanese vs. Rosetta Stone Japanese
Rosetta Stone Japanese offers both a monthly subscription plan and a lifetime access plan. Like Rocket Japanese, they offer an integrated voice recognition tool to help you fine-tune your pronunciation. Lessons can be learned on desktop or mobile app and are as short as 10 minutes long. Tutoring is available for an additional monthly fee.
Is Rocket Japanese Worth the Money?
When you consider the amount of learning material included with Rocket Japanese, we think it’s worth the money. If you were to compare the cost of attending a language learning class at a college or university, Rocket Japanese ends up being many times more affordable.
One thing we really liked about Rocket Japanese is that they offer a free trial, so you can see if their course fits your learning style.
Rocket Japanese Review: Conclusion
Overall, Rocket Japanese is a great learning resource made for motivated students of Japanese. Whilst it does have it’s issues, it’s an all encompassing comprehensive course with everything you need to reach fluency in the Japanese language.
They’ve already come a long way in terms of improving the course, however in the future, we’d like to see some more issues being ironed out – for example we’d like to see the flashcard feature being able to test you on everything you’ve learnt from the other lessons, not just the current lessons. Better assessments, especially for writing would be very beneficial also. The content, generally, could also do with a facelift, especially compared with it’s far more engaging competitor, JapanesePod101.
The one-time fee (as opposed to a monthly subscription model) means that you set the timeline on your learning and you’re free to jump around the lessons as you wish. At any time, you can take the benchmark test to check your level and see how your language level has progressed.
All in all, whilst pricey, Rocket Japanese is one of the more comprehensive courses out there for learning Japanese, especially at the lower levels. It does everything very well (from culture to grammar, vocab to writing), but nothing exceptionally. Their ‘Mastery Method’, whilst clunky, does provide a logical way to learn, retain and use Japanese in everyday life.
For beginners in Japanese, we can safely recommend Rocket Japanese as a great comprehensive program. All that said, for more advanced Japanese learners, Rocket Japanese might not have enough content for your level, and we might instead recommend JapanesePod101.
Our Editorial Team is a group of language learning enthusiasts who are passionate about testing new apps and finding the best ways to learn a language.
