Rocket Spanish is an MP3 course available online and its bold sales copy would imply it represents the easiest way to learn Spanish. We are used to the hyperbole online these days, so this review will tackle whether Rocket Spanish is actually up to much and what you would actually be getting for your hard-earned money.

What is the sales hook with this course?

Rocket Spanish basically takes the same lead as many popular language courses of recent — interactive speaking. After the pioneering work of Michel Thomas and Paul Pimsleur, would-be learners realised that studying a second language could actually be fun and exciting.

In a nutshell, this means listening to dialogue, and then attempting to construe relevant answers and sentences. Many would argue this is the most effective way to learn language and the recent surge in language tape sales would suggest as much. Rocket Spanish’s course is on MP3, meaning you listen to it via your computer, or you download it to an MP3 player such as an Apple iPod or burn it to a CD player.

Perhaps the most unique angle of the course is the online interactive service. As an example, you will be shown a picture of an object, and then given three options in Spanish to determine the correct answer. The same is also done for an audio option. The idea is that if you work your way through these terms and repeat, then eventually they will embed themselves in your memory.

How long is the course?

Rocket Spanish is a 31 lesson interactive course, which according to the creator should take you three months or less to complete. Also included are a large amount of printed resources to refine grammar and memorise vocabulary.

So what level of competency does it take you to?

Well, the course won’t take you to the kind of fluency and articulation levels you might expect in an intellectual, but it will drive you to a proficient standard. Assuming you tackle the course faithfully, there is no reason why you should not be able to hold fine and rudimentary conversations with natives of the tongue. Along with the works of men like Thomas and Pimsleur, this certainly provides one of the easiest ways to learn Spanish tongue.

An added bonus to this course, which I would struggle to find in many others, is the emphasis on pronunciation. One of the course’s main selling points is the fact that you will learn how to speak like a native, i.e. adapt your tongue for the different countries around the world which each embrace Spanish as their own language. Essentially this is “street-wise Spanish” as opposed to the formal education we might expect to receive in the classroom. It’s up to the individual to decide which method is more pragmatic.

The summary

Rocket Spanish is a fine overall course, but it lacks one special ingredient: living in a Spanish-speaking country. Mind you, we’d be harsh to hold this charge against the course as no such course could provide that unique experience.

I would heartily recommend Rocket Spanish to those who are willing and able to learn the language. However, ensure you have the diligence required — although three months of learning is a short time in the right context, it does require weekly discipline. I would suggest that having finished the course — if you have finished the course(!) — that you book a trip to a Spanish-speaking country as soon as possible and truly exercise what you have learned. Rocket Spanish provides an excellent springboard, but it is only daily and exclusive language integration with native speakers that can teach you to swim. Ultimately the easiest way to learn Spanish is an integration of both methods.

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One of the most baffling things about learning Spanish is that, somewhere along the line, students realize that the Spanish they hear spoken by native speakers may or may not be the same Spanish that they had been taught at their university or high school.

Say, for example, it’s your first time traveling in Latin America and you go into a green grocer’s in Buenos Aires to ask the price of a box of strawberries that you saw in the display stand.

“¿Cuánto cuestan las fresas?” you ask, proud of your linguistic skills - the complete sentence, the verb that is properly conjugated, the Spanish 101 vocabulary that you remembered at just the right moment.

But instead of smiling and answering your question, the green grocer stares at you blankly, as if you have two horns growing out of the top of your head: “¿Eh?” It’s the reaction that every foreigner learns to know and to dread.

Your problem isn’t that you have a faulty memory - in Spain they would have understood you perfectly - it’s just that you’ve stumbled across one of the many linguistic variations in Spanish. Whereas in many parts of the Spanish-speaking world “fresas” is indeed the correct word for strawberries, in Argentina they are more commonly known as “frutillas.”

Frustrating? Yes. But should it be entirely unexpected? Just think about English and how many different ways the same thing can be expressed: a truck in the US is known as a lorry in Britain, and the Americans’ bathroom is known by the Brits as a loo; an American eraser is known as a rubber in England, whereas a rubber in the US is . . . Needless to say, the potential for confusion, and even embarrassment, is hardly lacking, especially if you’re a foreign speaker who is new to the language.

It’s no different in Spanish. Languages are big, complex phenomena and the ways we express things are constantly changing. Naturally, after several hundred years of minor mutations, the Spanish spoken in Mexico is somewhat different from the Spanish spoken in Argentina, which in turn is different from the Spanish spoken in Spain.

But that’s not to say that the native speakers from these different countries can’t understand one another - because they can. The differences between their ways of speaking the language are most likely to be a source of amusement and interest than anything else, something along the lines of: “You mean you guys say ‘frutilla’? Really? Because here we say ‘fresa’.”
That’s one of the great things about studying abroad: that you can become aware of the things which make language a living creature - unpredictable and surprising - rather than an artifact from a textbook.

Neutral Spanish isn’t spoken in any Spanish speaking country or city. Becoming aware of regional differences between the varieties of the language, as well as the things which the language has in common and which tie its 400 million speakers together, is part of the fun - and the challenge - of learning the language.

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Fortnightly Tenerife News, Spain - 1 hour ago
Many people even book a course in advance and come to Tenerife both to enjoy their holiday and learn Spanish. If you are interested in taking one of the …

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