Rocket Portuguese Premium

Rocket Languages—based in Christchurch, New Zealand, and with offices in Southern California—offers pleasant online, interactive programs for language study. I spent some time with Rocket Portuguese Premium and enjoyed it, though it did not become a love relationship.

The company was consistently responsive to my inquiries and strikes me as being philosophically committed to language-learning. Over the years, I have encountered firms whose attention to pedagogical effectiveness appears to have been subordinated to the demands of mass-market efficiency. Rocket still exudes language love.

I confess I am not a huge fan of learning on a computer. I don’t like being on a computer, I don’t like clicking, I don’t like reading on a computer screen. That is my prejudice, and I know not everyone shares it.

In terms of content, what I saw in Rocket Portuguese was solid, and you can learn a lot. In some quizzes, I found a few questions kind of silly. The application also contained quite a few proofreading errors. However, they were not of a nature that compromised my learning experience, and the company responded quickly to my messages and fixed mistakes promptly and politely.

If you factor in pricing, my impression is that Rocket Portuguese Premium is a good deal for $99.95, given the amount of content. (There is also a CD version, with higher audio quality, that costs roughly triple that.)