Headquartered in New Zealand, Rocket Languages offers products for multiple languages. I didn’t use Rocket French enough, or recently enough, to rate it, but I liked my brief encounter with it in April 2011 well enough to consider trying it further in the future.

My focus during that Rocket French encounter: verbs. Specifically, a software application called MegaVerbs. It consisted of hard-core drills—involving subjunctive! conditional! past tense! future!—where your mission was to type in the correct verb forms for a series of questions. You got four tries; when you got something right, you were 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 do the written equivalent of slurring your words and hope you are understood anyway.

The current Rocket French product includes audio lessons, grammar lessons, quizzes, cultural lessons, and other features, all available through an online interface.