Andrew Feinberg: Duolingo and Norwegian

So, learning a language is a lot like making pickles.

I think it really is. That should be the, that should be the episode.

Hey everyone, and uh welcome to another Actual Fluency Podcast. This is episode 6 of the fourth season. And in this episode, I'm talking with Mr. Andrew Feinberg, who is a contributor to Duolingo's Norwegian course, and also a super guy. So uh hope you will enjoy this little talk with Andrew where we get into loads of topics related to culture, language learning, living abroad, food even, and uh just a really nice, you know, basic chat as the Actual Fluency podcast was meant to be.

Americans are not usually totally into multilingualism, so where did you find the passion originally?

I echo the exact same storyline that some of your guests have had. That's right. Is that they had uh Hebrew in Hebrew school. And it was a thing that I had, and it um I didn't learn any words exactly, like we didn't know, we didn't learn the language exactly. We sort of just read, we learned how to read.

Right.

And that was enough for your Bar Mitzvah or your Bat Mitzvah when you were 13. And then you sort of was like that was supposed to be the end of your Hebrew education for most people. Because most people aren't really that enthused like most, this might have to do with like the low attendance rates for reform synagogues. But, but like, they really wasn't much of an effort to get people to learn the actual Hebrew language.

Hmm.

And I I think that that's really crazy, and I can't wait to I Hebrew is on my list of languages to learn in the future. I'm not at it right now, but part of the reason I'd like to learn it is so that I can actually know what I've been saying all these years. And I'm not religious anymore. I don't consider myself uh any religion. But I think that it's just an important part of my heritage to know what it's about.

Spreading the love.

Spreading the Norwegian love. Yeah.

There you go. That's fantastic. And so the interest into culture led led you to go into the language behind the culture and then you you sort of, as you developed your interest for Norwegian, you've you've grown that to now you're interested in studying more languages. Is that is that correct?

Absolutely. I I first started learning German in high school because I I wanted to learn Norwegian but they didn't have it at the university where I was at.

What a surprise.

The closest thing and I and I actually sort of expected them to because they had crazy, crazy different, they had Swahili, they had um they had Hindi and Farsi and they had all kinds of languages because I went to BU's high school and you could take anything at BU. But, Boston University. But I

Not Norwegian.

Surprise, surprise. They didn't have, they didn't even have Swedish and I thought, oh God, I'm I have to take German. But German really did help me out with my Norwegian.

Oh yeah.

It's like, it's the vocabulary and a little bit of the grammar. But of course German is a lot more difficult. And uh and Polish, which I'm learning right now is just insane.

[laughs]

I I sort of ventured into Polish because I wanted to I wanted to step into the Slavic languages. I know I'm going to be studying in Norway in August and the most popular Slavic language there is actually Polish.

Right.

Because of the the migration for work and and etc. And

What are you going to study there?

I'm studying, it's kind of a complicated thing, it's called transnationalism, globalization and culture.

Mhm.

Uh it's going to be hard to put on a CV, but it's um it's like a mix of political science and economics and the studying of uh trade and international relations and everything that it's pretty pertinent to what American politics is is sort of focused on right now with international trade deals and I know that I often see people posting about like the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the the impending free trade agreement between Europe and the US. And uh that's gonna be just fascinating and hopefully a little bit marketable.

It was, sounds exciting. And if you pair it up with a few languages, I guess it's it's a winner.

Oh, I hope so.

And is it in Norwegian or English?

It's completely in English.

Okay. That's international.

I didn't want.

Internationally. They do that a lot in Scandinavia. It's not, I mean even in Denmark there's a lot of courses offered by the universities in English because they're trying to attract foreign students such as yourself to come in there and enrich the environment so to speak with uh different points of view and different experiences.

I think it's wonderful because grad school in the US can run you $100,000 easily.

This is.

And you and in Norway it's completely free. And so many people in my life when I said I got into grad school in Norway, asked me if it's really free then why doesn't everyone do it?

Right.

And I I always respond with, that's a great question. I really don't know why people don't do it more often.

Well, But it's sort of inconvenient. It's sort of far away. I mean, the the the selection of courses in English is quite limited as you probably know. I mean, you can find usually the the types of courses they would have in English would be something like that, you know, international relations, uh some languages maybe, uh but if you want to study, I mean, you can't go to Norway and study to be a doctor in English, you know. So, or lawyer or whatever people want to become these days.

I think a lot of people don't know, no. Like I have another friend who's uh who's studying in Germany for free. And the whole idea of going to college for free to a to a American who is less than 30 years old is just blows our minds.

That's why.

Completely blows our minds. It doesn't make sense. Um and it's how, I mean, public universities in the US by and large were free until I don't know, maybe 30 or 40 years ago, like especially in um the famous UCs in California were all free.

Mhm.

And now they're really struggling financially and the costs keep going up.

Right. So you have cheaper universities, community colleges.

Yeah.

Right. But still not free.

Still not free and I I yeah, it's just it hasn't ever sort of been discussed. Like it's sort of like so many people in the US are so buried in debt because of their education, but

Yeah, it's crazy isn't it? To see.

Yeah.

But I mean, it's not totally uncommon for people in in countries with free university to have student debt when they leave university. It's just not as extreme. I know most of my peers definitely when they finished their five-year degree would would still have, you know, maybe a mid-range two two-figure debt in US dollars. So, that's still some, but it's not $300,000.

No, and that's so unfair to give a human being right at the start of making.

I think so too. I think so too. It doesn't make any sense.

Not even. Yeah. It doesn't make any sense. And and and frankly, I don't understand why so many people do it. But I guess it's just we're in this kind of template of life or the script that it's prescribed to all of us that, oh, after school you should go to university, get a good job, work for 30 years or 40 years, whatever, get a gold watch and then you retire.

Yeah.

I guess that's the the the key here. So, and a lot of money is made on on the students as well. So, what can you do?

I got started by going to the Barnes & Noble bookstore at the BU campus, which is right below the huge Citgo sign, which if you've ever seen pictures of Boston, like there's a giant Citgo sign. Regardless, that's where the the store is and uh and I just flipped through the foreign, they had a huge foreign book section. And for Norwegian, they had a teach yourself book, and they had some other easy beginner books that would not even take you past like A0 if there was such a level.

Right.

Um but in in searching for a Slavic language to learn, I also picked up some books on Czech and Croatian and I learned a little bit of Russian. And it just, to me, it like to have the background noise of those other languages, I think really helps you tune into the differences and similarities in a way that I think really works for me.

Hmm.

And you know, it it can still be easy like to to mess up even in this like late stage. Like I remember being at the airport in Oslo and saying "yetbra" instead of "shembra".

[laughs]

And um and this is like years and years after. So I mean, I think like it can it can produce funny little results. But I think ultimately it was a good decision I made to just sort of like see the differences.

Right. And if you want to learn Swedish later, then you've got those basics as well.

Yeah. I I really don't feel like I need to learn Swedish.

No, me neither.

Because uh because with Yeah, I mean it depends on, as long as you know, if you have one of those three mutually intelligible languages, as long as you know what you need to do to sound like suitable to the person you're speaking with, you can you can get by. I had, when I was in your home country about a month ago, I had like a half an hour conversation with someone in Danish.

Wow.

And it felt really sweet, but like, like this like we both had to speak really clearly as best as we could.

Sure.

And I had to knew like I had to have had like the the Norwegian that I had on Duolingo, I'm sorry, the Danish. In order to sort of understand like just the the feeling for it. Because it can sound like when a Norwegian tries to speak in Danish, it can sound like it's exaggerated.

Oh yeah, yeah.

Like you can sound like um I often hear that like Americans Americans when they try to speak in a British accent, they often sound like Oliver Twist.

[laughs]

And um and the same can be said when a Norwegian, because Norwegians are fascinated by the Danish accent.

Sure, yeah.

But they they often overdo it when they.

So how does it feel as a as an American with this mutual, you know, understanding? Because I can imagine that it must be harder on some points to understand the others because you don't have that kind of very deep long experience with the Scandinavian languages.

I had had one other experience when I was living in Boston where we I had a little meetup with the Scandinavian enthusiasts and there was one woman there who had learned an old Danish dialect from like 100 years ago that was passed down in her family like after they left Denmark. And it was kind of an older version of Danish. And I was able to speak with her just fine.

Uh huh.

And I felt like, oh, that's just a, you know, of course like Danish and and Norwegian were basically the same written language for hundreds of years. So I felt like that would be an easy enough transition as long as we spoke slowly enough.

Sure.

But when I, I think I only realized that I could speak with Swedes when I was at the first Polyglot Berlin conference a year ago that I went to. And there were a few a few women there from Finland, but they only spoke Swedish. They didn't speak Finnish, they they grew up without learning the Finnish language. But speaking with them when they spoke Swedish was just completely no no problem. I and that really took took me aback because I'd never tried speaking with a Swede. And it was just a it was far easier than I thought it would be.

That's.

I think in part because.

In part because.

Of the like learning the sound differences that I did when I was in Vienna learning it on my own.

Right. It's pretty cool though, isn't it? You just get a language for free.

Yeah, it's um something I've tried to do in like, I've tried to maximize the utility like often when I research what language to learn next. I often Google like, what's the most mutually intelligible Slavic language? And because I have a my my sister's boyfriend's brother-in-law, which is quite the connection. But he's he's from uh Belarus and he speaks Russian. And speaking with him, he says, oh, like there's really no big deal like when two people speak a Slavic language, you can pretty much get what they're what they're talking about if they're really basic. And I said to myself, oh, like I have to learn, I feel like in order to get my foot in the door in the Slavic world, I should learn an easy Slavic language. But the the thing is that there's no such thing.

Yeah. You said you're a moron, yeah.

Slavic languages are so, so conservative and contain so many features that make them hard.

Oh yeah.

I'd say for it's just absolutely mind-boggling that the word if in Polish is broken down by gender and number.

Mhm.

And when you and it it's it's a particle that seems like it should be completely independent of nouns and and noun declension. But then you like, if you want to use, if you want to use a noun and then a verb, and then you want to describe this noun like for like, he is good. Like, 'on jest dobrze'. It would be like that 'dobrze' is in the nominative case, but he is a man would be in the instrumental case. And he is, he is not a man would be in the genitive case.

Oh god, yeah. And these three cases are things you have to learn to say the most basic things.

So in German you can begin with sort of nominative and then you can move into accusative, then dative, then genitive and it can all go very gradually. When you start learning Polish, you have to learn everything at once, it seems.

Right. And it's notoriously hard.

Yeah. And uh it it only starts to sink in once you've just put hours and hours into it.

Right. Is it on Duolingo yet?

Oh, absolutely. I finished the the tree.

So you're keeping it golden and.

I'm trying my best. But even like, even on Duolingo if I feel like I got if I got all of those words just burned into my brain, I still wouldn't be able to read a news article or something like that.

Of course. Speaking of Duolingo, that's something that people often like to take uh well as as they say in England, take the micky out of sometimes. Um, what do you think about, obviously you're a contributor to Duolingo, you're a little bit biased, but in your eyes, what are what are the main strengths of of using Duolingo to learn languages with?

I'd say let me first start out by saying I'm not an official spokesman of any kind. But I'd say what I really like about Duolingo is that they're scientifically based. They have an like a series of AB tests to determine the best methods that people learn languages with. And if something doesn't work, they'll remove it. And they'll always test everything on on half the user base in order to see if it improves learning. And that level, that like kind of organic progression that the program goes through is something that I I find really impressive.

Sure.

So if if the volunteers are not putting in the time, energy and effort to make a well-structured course, then the course might not be might not be great. And as as tempting as it is to think that the quality of all the Duolingo courses is equivalent across the languages, uh it's not perhaps the case.

Well, it's different people, isn't it? I mean, yeah, but maybe some people don't know that Duolingo is not, of course they're producing all the languages, but it's more of a, they're more organizing volunteers than producing it themselves. So you don't have that kind of quality, not control necessarily, but it's just each course, it's its own, is is its own kind of living creature, you know, it evolves differently from all the other courses. They might start with the same template some of them, but then the volunteers kind of take it in this direction. So, I I don't think that's a very fair criticism. Like, oh, the Danish course was much better than the Norwegian course. Well, I mean, that doesn't make any sense.

I think they all they evolve at different levels. But they the criticism that I have is that I yeah, I I'd say that it's just dependent on like all the courses will will get better over time. And that's and but they'll have different starting places and they'll have different I I think that to learn a language, there's a somewhat of a logical progression that the grammar needs to be introduced in and the the vocabulary. And sometimes I feel like that for certain courses it's a little bit out of place.

It's all right. The method is.

To put him.

The method is perhaps not so good with really grammar intensive courses because you need to have a lot of those info sheets or whatever it it's called, the note pages or whatever. Whereas other languages like English, it will be very obvious uh what the changes are, what the new knowledge is. But for languages like Russian, you need a lot of by the way, this is how you do this kind of in between stuff from all the just the translation and the pick out the right image or whatever they they have now for the active learning parts.

I'd say that the courses are very well structured in general. And I think that I mean the the volunteers only build the courses that have fewer than 5 million or so learners. So the really big courses are are developed by the people who actually work at Duolingo.

Sure.

And I don't want to get off on a tangent saying that like, oh, these courses contain giant errors or or like gaps in pedagogy. Just to say that, um, I'd say that by and large, they are built by pretty devoted people. Some of them do stall out like in development. Um, there might be a year before a course really gets off the ground.

Sure.

And that can be a little bit of.

So a lot of time.

Yeah, it can be some disappointment because everyone's sort of waiting for this one course. Uh and you might have to wait a bit. Like like there's a huge culture of people just saying, this this course is fully developed, it's at 100%. Why can't I learn it? There's a huge there's a huge process that involves implementing the audio and making sure that it runs smoothly and that it tests smoothly. And that's so beyond the the point of what the contributors are able to do. And it's now in the hands of the developers who are working the code behind the scenes.

Sure. What do you think about the actual learning that's done? That's another criticism that often comes up when talking about Duolingo. Um, people say, well, a lot of people who use Duolingo are are, you know, teenagers who just put it on their phone because it was at the top of the Google Play market or iOS market. And while they do, while they are doing the lessons, they're not really learning that much.

It really it really depends on the language and how easy the language is to begin with. So I think with the Norwegian course, you can I don't it's it's more of a like an exposure thing. Duolingo is perfect for exposing how exposing you how a language sounds and how it's written. It there's still working on the on the component of producing the language from you. I'd say that like there was a long time. A lot of people the algorithm sort of pushed people into translating into English or into the native language from the the language you were learning and not so much the other way around.

Sure.

But I think that I I think you have to be you have to listen to and read and write any given word in any given conjugation 10 times before it actually sticks in your brain. You have to keep forgetting in order to remember.

Mhm.

And that's something that's really frustrating because like because you have to go through 10 different failures of not knowing a word before you actually do know the word. And if you let one of those instances trip you up, you're you're going to lose a lot of steam. But you have to just keep saying like all this failure and all this non-recognition, all this not knowing what the word means is going to lead you to actually knowing what the word means at the end of the day.

Right. And also, I think what I usually say is, there are very few methods in the world where you're going to end up with that useful, fluent language at the end if you only use that method. I mean, a teach yourself or an Assimil might have you further along the way, but it also it takes a lot longer to get through, I would imagine. Definitely getting through properly and not just, you know, glancing through. But one method on its own is rarely enough to produce a high level in a language. So I always say, well, if you're on your phone, if you have a commute or something, you know, might as well put on a bit of Duolingo, you know, have some fun with it and what, you know, it can't hurt you to get extra exposure to the language.

No. I'd say I don't ever really like I remember being bad at speaking German. And then I but I had all the grammar in my head from German classes and I just didn't have the, I couldn't get used to hearing myself actually speak fluent sentences until I um until I attended like a bunch of the cafe Stunden that they were having at these like coffee clutches that they had at the the German house when I where I went to school.

Sure. I definitely agree. And I also think that you can strengthen a language without studying it as well. If you give it a a good, if you work a lot on a language, like German, if you learn a lot of words and then you take a break for a few weeks, I find that I'm usually stronger in the language when I come back because it's kind of been, I don't know, brewing in my brain or my brain has had time to assimilate or whatever.

Brain's been mating.

Yeah, basically it's been brewing the the on the all the input that I've been giving it. So I don't think I don't think people should be worried about taking a break once in a while and just let those memories kind of settle in.

I was amazed by being about halfway through, I went about halfway through the Polish Duolingo tree in like a sprint that took maybe one or two weeks. And I said to myself like, oh, I I came back to it months and months and months later and I said to myself, I'm not going to remember anything.

Right.

It's been such a long time. But it comes back so fast. And so many of the patterns stick in your brain that you never thought would, that it's um it I'd liken it a lot to like taking a nap or a rest. When you go to sleep, your your brain like cycles all these thoughts.

Yeah.

And it's something that's really healthy for your mind to think about other things. And I think this has a lot to do with my initial conversation about learning Swedish and then learning Norwegian. If you sort of go back and forth, it it it and just expose your brain to other things, it sort of hits the reset button.

Yeah. I like that. I mean our brains are so incredible.

I yeah.

I I think so.

I think variety is also really important. I have um I'm someone who doesn't really like, I can't like can't really get a book to track, I can't get very many books to sort of keep my attention for more than a week. But I have I just bought this Lonely Planet Polish phrasebook. And it explains the grammar in tables that's surprisingly useful. And I think that because something like a phrase book is trying to get as much useful information into your head in such a quick time. It it does help in a way that if I didn't have this, I would be really lost.

Right. Do you use any lists or flashcard apps or any of that stuff?

I don't. I I'm fascinated by the idea of but I think it's called like the Swabish list.

Okay.

And that's the the list that have the frequency, the most frequent words in the language. But they always tend to be the same kind of things like woman, man, child, things like that. And those are the things that are, oh, those are the things that you really have to get drilled into your head in the very beginning sections of of any given course. But I think that if you're exposed to them enough times, if you see a word enough times, you'll just make a mental note of it that this is a word, this is a word that's really common, that's really important and I need to memorize.

Right.

And I think that exposure in a given context is going to be way more useful than a flash card.

Right. Yeah. And I'm very.

Like I'm a fan of, you won't really learn the word 'dla', which means for in Polish, unless it's in a context where that would actually make sense.

Yeah, so you would learn a whole sentence to to learn that one word would make more sense.

Yeah.

But you can have sentences on flash cards.

You totally can. And that I think it was I forget which famous, quote unquote famous polyglot once said this, but they never have flash cards in their mother tongue. They always try to make the flash cards completely in the other language.

Right.

Or using some kind of a picture.

Right. Gabriel did that for instance. I know he he doesn't have English on his flash cards. He just has a picture representation of of the flash card or yeah, something like that, which is also kind of strange, but it works.

It works. I I'm someone who I think for for flash cards that can really work. Uh I still get a good amount of I I still get the feeling that like when you translate sentences on Duolingo, it's ultimately going to help you.

Sure.

Because I think like the the pedagogy of Rosetta Stone is, we're not going to teach you anything with English. We're going to use just images and you're going to get everything through context. But so many abstract verbs and nouns, you really just need a straight up translation.

Yeah.

You're going to need um, one of my favorite sources to use is Wiktionary.

Mhm.

Which doesn't have every word in the world, but I think Wiktionary in combination with something like Forvo is just an incredible combo.

Yeah.

Have you heard of Forvo?

Yeah, it's the pronunciation thingy where people submit their them pronouncing their own language.

I I think it's absolutely brilliant.

It's great great uh crowd-sourced pronunciation examples. It's quite good. It has a huge database for for many languages.

Oh. It's amazing and free. Like, just if you only have like the IPA to go on, you're still not going to be able to pronounce that like crazy check 'r'.

Right. Well, and obviously losing out on the pronunciation is something that a lot of home students do because they you only have the teach yourself or the whatever textbook you've chosen. And or the Assimil even. And like me, sometimes people are too lazy to put on the CD. So you just read and I do that all the time and it's just really terrible because it really halts the progress in pronunciation. But too hard.

I'd say that yeah, if if you like the audio is so important for the rhythm of the language.

Yeah.

I when I bought these two books, I bought a I bought the full complete yourself, like it was on sale, which is what I bought this just 'cause it was on sale, but it was the complete Greek teach yourself um booklet and CDs alongside the Italian one. And I have all these CDs now and I just looked at my computer and I said, oh, I just I don't have a CD player on my computer.

This is This is something that.

Oh. This is something I'm [laughs] I have to buy on Amazon. So.

Yeah, that's.

I went and bought this like this brilliantly like strange piece of technology called a CD player.

An external a an external CD player.

Yeah, it's like it's such a strange like time warp to plug this into to plug this into your computer. Oh, this it used to be so convenient and now it's so inconvenient. What else works like that?

You know, I'm I'm old enough to remember when CDs were introduced. Um not the music, that they were quite I mean they were very popular when I when I grew up, but the PC CD-ROMs, you know, you could put in the computer. Uh I I remember using diskette discs a lot and they were just terrible. They were awful. Like there's no space on a on a cassette. There just isn't. And uh then when this CDs came out, I was like, wow, you can have 600 megabytes on one CD. You know, these small tiny discs would only have like a couple of megabytes each. So to install Windows, I remember installing Windows uh 3.1 using uh discs and it was like 19 discs.

Yes, I remember my dad having a copy of like Windows 95 with like just a bunch of floppy disks.

Yeah, exactly, floppy disks. They were just so terrible. So when the CDs came out, I was like, wow, this is amazing technology. And now we've just sort of gotten rid of it in in favor of USBs and memory cards and all this, which is of course brilliant. But

Correct downloads.

Yeah, yeah. Direct downloads. Why why do you like my internet today is faster like by a factor of probably 10 of what my hard drive could even transfer back then. So, you know, there's why do you need storage. But then again you find a nice old teach yourself or whatever and they're like, here's your CD. In fact, I have an Assimil CD in front of me. Ungarn ohne Mühe. And luckily, my computer is, I don't know if it's good enough or old enough or whatever it is, but it actually does have a CD drive. Um and I can put it in. Um but I I like what Colloquial have done with uh you know, they put all their audios online.

Yes, I love that.

So when you so when you buy a Colloquial, in fact, you don't even need to buy a Colloquial book, you can just go and download them. I don't know how useful they would be without the book. But um they're for free online. So you don't need to worry about all these stupid CDs and and discs and and stuff because it's really inconvenient. especially if you don't even have a CD drive.

Yes, I think they um Colloquial has done something that I I like when companies do, which is they sort of give in to a technological change.

Yeah, no, they don't give in, they're just adapting, I think.

I I think I perhaps that's too strong of a word, but they they make a concession that that is a positive step forward and that gives them it it's positive for their brand.

For sure.

Because they they sort of level with the customers that the customers know, they they don't want CDs and that their real product is the books.

Yeah, I just don't like when I when I go to the Assimil shop, I have the option of, do you want to buy the book or the book and the CD? Cause to me they're like both integral parts of the product. It's like buying a computer without a keyboard. You know, it's like, would you like the computer and the keyboard or would you just like the computer? And it's like, I can't really use it without a keyboard, can I?

It depends on if you already have the let's say you have the language as a a heritage language. It's a language you've you've learned all your life, uh through your childhood, but you just never got around to read and write it.

Mhm.

It it would be perhaps uh sufficient to have the text.

But I think you learn better with the audio anyway, even if you know how it's supposed to sound. I still think your memory is better. You learn better because of the the, you know, the memory hooks of seeing it and listening to it at the same time.

I I'd agree with that.

But we'll see. I haven't actually tried this. I think this is actually more of a software, but it looks kind of old and I mean, we'll we'll see what happens. So I promise to take a look at it and uh it says on the back, for Windows 2000 XP Vista Windows 7 not Mac OS.

Yes.

That's pretty aggressive.

I I was very frustrated the first uh CD drive that I bought was not compatible with my computer because I had a Mac.

That's funny, isn't it?

And uh it seems like, darn it. Like even in this this age where, you know, almost everyone, I don't personally have an iPhone, but almost everyone it seems like where I work has an iPhone and like Apple has sort of come to its own. But there's just so much that still is incompatible.

Yeah, and also the fact that they were kind of, I think they were the some of the first companies to get rid of the CD drives as well, just to uh have lighter PCs. Like the the the MacBook Air, I guess, the first MacBook Air was probably one of the first ones that didn't have it. And now I don't think many of their computers even have a CD drive. Definitely not the uh 13-inch and and below, I suspect. I don't know the entire range, but I think the CD drive is quite rare in in these portable laptops these days.

I'd say for sure.

But then again, who needs a CD drive? You know, you can just download just download away from anywhere.

Uh yeah.

I, yeah, unless you have these these teach yourself CDs.

Right. You need those, yeah. Well, you should probably, I mean, you could probably uh copy them to your computer, so you don't have to load them from the CD every time.

Oh, I've done that, but just every time you get a new one.

Yeah. It's annoying, isn't it? They should.

You.

Well, that's funny because um people, you know, I I I know that people's uh focus uh isn't what it used to be. And I know some people love to listen through all the all through out the episodes. Uh but I also know a lot of people who cut it off. So it's kind of like a um if I called it, you know, the pickled method or whatever, it would be kind of a a bonus to the people who listen all the way through the end. I think that's kind of nice. I'll I'll definitely do that.