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April 22, 2011 | French
Rocket French
I try out a new product, and verbs fly thick and fast.
Yesterday I sampled something called Rocket French, from the company Rocket Languages. With offices in Santa Monica, Calif., and Christchurch, New Zealand, Rocket offers products for 11 languages, from French and Spanish to Arabic and American Sign Language.
MegaVerbs!
My focus: verbs. Specifically, a software application called MegaVerbs. This application consists of hard-core drills, where your mission is to type in the correct verb forms for a series of questions. You get four tries; when you get something right, you are politely told “oui” and given a new verb.
I like this kind of intensive training. It’s like verb boot camp. You can’t fudge it. You can’t cheat. You can’t slur your words and hope you are understood anyway.
There is a MegaVocab application, too, that I would like to try. Plus much, much more that I haven’t yet investigated. The reason I went straight to the verbs is that I am just really, really into verbs. If you don’t know verbs, you are seriously out of luck when you try to communicate!
Although there were a couple of usability issues with the MegaVerbs application, which director Jason Oxenham, also one of the company’s founding members, tells me they are working to address in the next two to three months, I did love the content. I adore rapid-fire, bare-bones drills. They really work for me. I did subjunctive, conditional, future, past tense—all good stuff.
Unfortunately, a natural disaster recently struck Rocket. The company’s Christchurch offices were destroyed on February 22 of this year, in a major earthquake. This amateur footage, which shows the quake, by coincidence starts right outside Rocket’s offices.
I like earnest companies that do good things, like make language-learning products. Best wishes to Rocket for a speedy rebuilding!
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