RocketSpanishReviewed.com

The makers of Rocket Spanish have changed the way that users access and interact with the course. The new (and improved ?) course is known as the Rocket Spanish Learning lounge. This article will review the changes and discuss if the course is better or worse for these changes.

So the major change is pretty much reflected in the name of the new course. The emphasis has changed from downloading the course and running it on your desktop to logging into the learning lounge and using the course online.

In the previous version of the course, you would download the audio files, pdf books and various games. You could then play them whenever you wanted and were pretty much responsible for how you progressed in the course. What I liked about this was the freedom you had. You could download the audio in one hit and then add it to your mp3 player or ipod. Thus you could listen to the audio when you had a spare moment (on the bus to work, doing the grocery shopping etc.) In fact, once you had downloaded the course from the Rocket Spanish website, unless you chose to participate in the forum, you would never have to visit the site again.

The learning lounge concept is a bit different. They want you to visit as much as possible and to this extent they have added new features to the course that encourage students to return. The main drawback of the course in it’s original version was that there was no feedback given to the student on how they were progressing.

Getting feedback helps to motivate a student and is an objective method to determine what the student needs to focus on. The learning lounge has multiple choice quizzes with each lesson. The student is encouraged to take the quiz at the end of the lesson. The answers are marked by the system and a score is returned. If the student passes the quiz, he/she can decide to progress onto the next lesson.

There are two stages. The first stage is Spanish basics and consists of 4 lessons. The second stage  is more advanced and focuses on cultural aspects of Spanish and South American culture. It consists of 5 lessons. Each stage has a certification test. This is a 100 question multiple choice test that covers all the lessons you have learned up to that stage. This test is really good and helps to reinforce your learning and tell you if you have really learned the concepts presented in the previous lessons.

I think this feedback aspect of the Rocket Spanish Learning lounge is a great improvement on the original course. Logging in and going through the lessons and taking the quizzes gives the student some structure. This is often lost when the student has to take this responsibility onto their own shoulders. So this is good and is more like a student/teacher relationship.

In terms of the content of the learning lounge course and the original course, they are exactly the same as far as I can see. There is also a forum and you can still download the mega games – megaaudio, megaverb and megavocab. You download the games to your desktop and run them as per the original course. They have the same functionality. You can also download the audio files within the learning lounge but it seem this can only be done one lesson at a time, which could be annoying.

In general, I think the learning lounge concept has improved the Rocket Spanish course. It makes your Spanish learning more structured and can motivate you by giving feedback. A lack of these teaching methods tends to hold people back when they decide to learn Spanish with a self study course.

Go to the Rocket Spanish Learning lounge now.