How to use Rocket Chinese?

Please Note: This review was produced independently of Rocket Chinese but does contain affiliate links.

When starting to learn Chinese it is natural to feel a bit lost and finding a good direction to start learning the language isn’t always easy. No matter what your goal is with Chinese, using the best resources will help you a long way. Rocket Chinese is one that kind of an option, an online learning platform that shows you the way on your journey.

After registering your (premium) account, there is a My Study Plan on your first page of the dashboard. What is great about Rocket Chinese is that it’s easy to use. With just one look you know where to start and how to progress.

On My Study Plan you will see which lessons you have learned already and what is up next. The improvement you make will be clearly visible to you which motivates you to do your best to finish the course.

Every lesson has instructions on what you will learn and how to follow the lesson. You will first practise by listening to the audio lesson, which you can do on your computer or download the full audio file to be listened on your mobile or mp3 player. Listen to the lesson while driving to work, cleaning at home or jogging at the gym.

When listening to the audio, pauses are given to you for repeating the words and phrases outloud. This is an excellent way to learn as you will use what you just learned seconds ago, it makes remembering new things much easier. By listening to the teacher’s voice you will learn how the correct standard Mandarin sounds like, try to imitate it the best you can.

All the audio dialogs are available in mp3, pinyin, Chinese characters and English, making sure that you will understand everything about the lesson. It would be nice to be able to hide the pinyin or English, but that unfortunately isn’t possible yet on Rocket Chinese.

After learning the contents of the lesson, you can test how you are doing. Testing is very important as you want to make sure you have learned everything before you move on to the next lesson. If you perform well in the tests, you can go back to the dashboard and choose your next lesson.