Teacher to Teacher: A German language professor shares how he uses Quizlet

At Quizlet, we love learning from students and educators from around the world. Last week, Professor Hiroki Iwai and colleagues Makiko Oyama and Yu Higashisawa were in San Francisco and stopped by the Quizlet office for a visit.

Professor Iwai is an avid Quizlet user, with over 230 sets created in the last few years. He teaches beginning conversational German at Osaka University in Japan and is always looking for new tech tools to support his lessons and help his students. We asked him about how he is using Quizlet with his classes, and he gave us great insights and product feedback.

How Quizlet supports language learning

Every five weeks, Professor Iwai asks his students to get into groups, write short scripts, and create videos. To prepare for this assignment, he creates Quizlet sets with the German to English dialogue and shares them with his students via LoiLoNote School, their classroom management tool. Professor Iwai often records his own voice on these sets, to slow down the audio so that it’s easier for students to hear the correct pronunciation. After studying and listening to the new phrases on Quizlet, his students then practice their scripts out loud on Dragon Dictation, a voice-to-text tool.

An example of student videos from Professor Iwai's class.

Besides the ability to record custom audio, Professor Iwai’s favorite aspect of Quizlet is adding images. He finds that providing visual context to new vocabulary is very helpful to his students and makes his sets more engaging. He also appreciates how easy it is to create content on Quizlet and how he can reuse his sets from year to year, which saves him a lot of time.

Many thanks to Professor Iwai, Makiko, and Yu for spending the morning with us! You can view more of his excellent vocabulary sets and student videos here.