Rocket Spanish?
Just curious if anyone has done this. I used to burn through courses, Rosetta, Pimsleur, Michel Thomas, Speak and Learn...FSI... etc.. in the hopes that i would become fluent in Spanish and move on and I feel like I am about halfway there. Like most of you I can converse in written Spanish very well and I can understand Mexican Spanish most of the time while "Spain" spanish is much tougher (the pronuncations I think are very different.) Anyway I have given up on courses and just basically come up with things to say and bounce them off my friends at work now... like today's "Si yo tuviera algunos dulces sabes que te daria algo". (success with that one). Mostly I am right, sometimes wrong. That is how I have been progressing now since I already know most of the words that i hear daily etc.. and of course music.
Now I see this Rocket course though and I want to try it. Maybe you have seen it around. I hate studying this way but sometimes you make leaps and bounds in advances like I did with the Michel Thomas course. Anyone try it? Without more information I will surely buy it and try it. Sincerely yours, Jeezzle.
6 Answers
They've got Rocket Japanese, Rocket Spanish, Rocket French, etc. Do they have Rocket Science?
I have tried Rocket Spanish, but I never did complete the program - for what I think to be a good reason. As I began my studies with rocket Spanish, a friend of mine turned me onto pimsleur. There are significant differences between these two programs, one of which lead me to Pimsleur in the first place.
Rocket Spanish is good. It is very informal and probably more practical in terms of vocabulary and usage, and it moves much faster than the sloooooooow mooooooooving piiiiiiimsleur.
However, there is a lot of time taken up with explanation, which i found to be quite irritating, hence my move to Pimsleur, which has little to no explanation. Pimsleur often expects you to connect the dots, which I liked. Because no one but me know hows I get from one dot to another the fastest. Rocket Spanish on the other hand, actually spends alot of time speaking about the concepts they are delivering.
I think if you have gone through all of those other courses, you may find the lengthy explanations to be unneccessary at your level. However, you may find that it presents information that may evoke your own personal eureka moment.
Try out the trial version, although you are far too advanced to take much out of it, it will definately present to you their method of teaching. I plan to go back and begin these lessons again as I think there is always value in these courses.
Here's a good comparison page of Rocket Spanish, Rosetta Stone and Visual Link, worth having a look, you might get surprised... http://spanishlearnsoftware.projectnewlife.com/compare-software
According to what I read that this site: Rocket Languages Spanish you can sign up for a free trial.
Get a Taste of the Full Rocket Spanish Multimedia 'Learn Spanish' Package with our FREE 6-Day Course...
The eternal question of "why" in language learning. "Why don't they say ...?" / "Why is X in Spanish different from Y in English (or whatever)? I have known students who said "I don't care why they say it that way, just tell me how they say it!". I have also known students who (even if they knew how to say something) were blocked/frustrated because they didn't feel that they knew why it was said that way.
In terms of language competence, it is sufficient to know how to say something even if you don't know why it is said that way.Thus we ask of "native-speakers" would you say "xxx?" (rather than "Why do you say "xxx"?) Most native-speakers are qualified to answer "that does/does not sound natural to me". Only a few are qualified to offer an explanation of why it sounds (or doesn't sound) natural.
The main advantage that children (as opposed to adults) have in learning a second language is that they are accustomed to being told ("Because that's the way it is." / "Because I say so.") and are more accepting of instructions (without explanations). Adults often want reasons and, by that, they usually mean "Why isn't it like my language?"
Yes I was surprised:-(
Here's a good comparison page of Rocket Spanish, Rosetta Stone and Visual Link, worth having a look, you might get surprised
I had a look:-(
The site suggested that I start to learn at least one foreign language ....starting with Spanish first...
....as soon as possible. You’ll be able to find a better job with larger salary or at least keep your current job and someone less skilled will be fired instead of you.
Somehow the idea of learning Spanish so that someone less skilled will be fired instead of me didn´t ring true with me at a motivation to learn the language.....
