Language Learning is Broken
thangudu.com
thangudu.com
As someone who has learned several languages to near native fluency and majored in linguistics at the University, I think the OP is right on in his estimate of the goal. But the biggest problem software in this area is facing is that language learning is not a one way street. You can't memorize thousands of words in all the contexts in which they occur and expect to be able to have any competency, at least for speaking & vocal comprehensione. Even when the software provides dialoges and attempts to simulate conversations (ie. "Pimsleur" and others), it fails because its the same over and over, mostly outside of real world contexts, where background noise, dialects, and other tasks are involved. A new language learner has to be able to respond rapidly and fluidly in spoken conversation over a variety of subjects if he/she wants to be able to function at the level the OP is talking about, and current software simply doesn't provide the degree of realism in these types of situations.
IMHO, in order for any software to be able to achieve the above stated goal, I think it would need to first have a very good humanlike AI. why? So you can have a "human partner" in conversations over a variety of subjects, where the learner is forced to quickly respond and interact with the partner/software. Otherwise, you're left with all the current options which are at best subpar in comparison to actually living and interacting with native speakers in the said country.
Perhaps software that scheduled live video chats of similar conversations between learners could help with the problem you bring up? Given that most language software aims at multiple languages anyway, seems like the only challenge is technical with the video chat (latency might be a problem although audio is pretty good too) and the scheduling interface. And I suppose enough users in each language willing to do such conversations.
Check it out, and let me know whether it's useful to you! We do English for Spanish speakers and Spanish for English speakers right now, with many more languages to come.
I mostly agree with the author's four points - I've tried a number of the well-known systems over the years, and none of them really worked for me. I mean, sure, you can brute-force your way through them, but I can probably just pick up a dictionary and do it on my own with about the same level of success.
The first service I've used that has actually worked for me is http://www.memrise.com. I've been using it the last few months to bash my head against the wall that is Mandarin, with surprising (for me) success so far. The 1.0 "launch" removed some very useful features from the beta, but overall it's still pretty good. Incidentally, I guess it's a counter-example to "flashcard systems don't work" - they can, if done right.
Recently I found http://www.fluentu.com/, which I'm also very excited about. I don't think by itself it can get anyone very far in a language, but once I'm at an intermediate level it should be a great addition.
Did I mention both those sites are free? (bye bye #4, excessively boring costly systems).
My point is I'm gradually cobbling together a system from multiple parts that works for me. There's a lot of innovation in the field, and more and more new options will become available. I don't know if we'll ever find a "holy grail" that works for everyone at the same time, but there's no reason why it can't be achieved for anyone by combining several free or low-cost resources.
Edit: one of the biggest problems is how boring most of the systems are. Starting a new language from scratch is difficult enough on its own, but it doesn't NEED to be boring. Look at children's cartoons compared to any typical adult learning video...
Just because it's free, doesn't mean it's free, especially if it doesn't get you closer to the holy grail.
I think innovators should strive to get to the holy grail. The potential upside would be huge.
The amazing thing about FluentU is that you can dissect videos of native speakers and understand exactly what's going on, in context, at your own pace. Again, I haven't used it enough to say that it works, but it should be quite effective at learning to understand the spoken language. Again, their costs are relatively low - they use Youtube videos and all they have to do is translate and annotate them.
Then you have an entire army of sites that let you find native speakers to talk to over Skype, or to correct your daily written "journal", etc.
None of those by itself is the "holy grail", but there's a lot of experimentation and innovation. I would argue that combining several of those methods can be at least as effective as something like Pimsleur or Rosetta Stone, at a much lower cost. And I think figuring out how to combine them into a single coherent service will be the holy grail you want.
Personal motivation is without a doubt the largest factor in whether a person successfully learns a language. To that end, I think the goal of any classroom or learning system should be to maintain a high level of learner motivation. There is a strong correlation for students of foreign languages (i.e. a language that is not spoken in the country where it is being learned) who are strongly interested in the culture of the language they are learning and their success at learning that language. This is because their motivation to learn, driven by their desire to experience the culture more completely, remains high throughout the learning process. Students who take language courses as part of a compulsory education curriculum, or who are studying out of casual interest, lose motivation quickly regardless of the learning system.
As a language teacher, I try to expose my students to as many learning techniques as possible. Some students successfully increase their vocabulary using word lists and flashcards, others require the pressure of real communication to acquire new words.
There will never be one "best way" to learn, so my advice to any learner is to try as many learning systems as possible, expose yourself to as much media in that language as possible, and constantly change it up so that you don't lose motivation.
I wouldn't say that language learning is broken, but rather that students who begin learning a language have misguided expectations about how difficult and time consuming it actually is. If you, as an adult learner, can learn just one foreign language fluently in your lifetime, you are doing well.
That necessity could be to be able to comunicate with others, living in a foreign land; or to be able to understand cultural products (like songs, books, movies, etc.), but I think if it's not present, or it's just a "I'd like/love to" level, is almost impossible to achieve a fluent level. Think of an English speaker that gets a lot of people just speaking to her in English, instead on their own different languages. It is too easy just to give up.
Of course one can just change the language of the actual game Skyrim, and this is decent for learning new medieval themed vocabulary, but imagine if the game were designed with the concept of language learning in mind.
At the beginning of the game, the characters would speak clearly and with simple vocabulary. Perhaps with subtitles of written text in the same language. Maybe even with an English (or whatever your native language is) subtitle if you are really having trouble with a task.
The vocabulary used would go along the same pattern of reinforcing while slowly building more.
I think it might be a neat concept to explore, to learn a language passively while playing a fun game.
I've thought a lot about this problem as well, and the best I can think of is to create mods, so you have the solid game engine and story already in place, and can then solve the language learning problem on top of that.
Here's a blog post I wrote about this topic: http://www.antimoon.com/blog/2012/06/making-adventure-games-...
No one tool is going to do everything. Flashcards are actually pretty good for acquiring masses of vocabulary. But it doesn't help you put those words together coherently or even enable you to comprehend what you hear.
Language acquisition is all about growing a set of extremely complex interconnections between brain cells. You need to grow a massive number of interconnections between many areas of the brain (including to sensory and emotional areas) and you need to strengthen those connections by repeated firing.
Software, books, audio and video can play a supportive role but there's a big chunk of the brain development that is only going to come from struggling to express your own mind and to interact with real people in real time.
In my experience with Japanese, using flashcards for kanji doesn't really help with long-term memory acquisition.
I agree with your latter point about context; it's better to find an unknown word in a sentence and look up its meaning, then you tend to remember the word longer b/c you understand how it's used.
My method for learning kanji was to count the strokes (it's relatively simple to figure the stroke count for any character: http://infohost.nmt.edu/~armiller/japanese/strokeorder.htm) then use that number to look them up in a dictionary.
But everything I looked up was in the context of a sentence, while trying to read a report at work, e.g.
IMHO the difference in the quality of learning varies greatly across the paper flashcard/supermemo-ish software continuum.
I just found it better to try to read the reports and memos being passed around at the office, and once I looked up kanji I didn't know, I would tend to remember them, since I'd read them in the context of a sentence.
Why not? Isn't it something they should strive for?
Trying to work with flashcards without a context (Learn the 1000 nost common words!), however, doesn't work at all. The words need to belong in a context with which I'm familiar, such as a book, film, or recurring conversation topic.
My attempt at vocabulary training (shameless plug, you call it): http://vocabulous.net. But that's pretty much only vocabulary, still on the drawing board on the rest of the components.
That said, the most important thing for the next big thing in language learning is that it's fun. Very few users will stick with it on willpower alone. Good thougts on this is at http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com. If I ever get the idea to learn japanese I'd check his stuff out.
"I believe the holy grail of language learning is the ability to learn a language outside the country that speaks it, to a level of fluency that puts the user within 30 to 45 days of advanced reading, speaking, and vocal comprehension fluency once they are in the country." That sounds like an ambitious, but reasonable, goal.
The author notes, while writing in English, "I’ve independently studied the following languages and achieved varying levels of fluency. By competency:
1. Spanish
2. French
3. German
4. Swahili
5. Russian
6. Hindi
7. Farsi
8. Arabic
9. Afrikaans
10. Polish"
That list is heavy on Indo-European languages (with Swahili in the highest place for a non-Indo-European language) and rather heavy on closely cognate languages within the Indo-European language family that share many mutual literary influences. Learning Japanese or learning Tamil for someone who already knows those languages would be a good test of a new method.
AFTER EDIT AS EDIT WINDOW IS ABOUT TO EXPIRE: Yes, Arabic too is a non-Indo-European language
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semitic_languages
and as a Semitic language in the Afroasiatic language family different language family is quite a differennt language from Swahili (a language from the Niger-Congo language family).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swahili_language
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niger%E2%80%93Congo_languages
My (partial but suggestive) list of languages studied before appears in my Hacker News user profile.
Is Arabic indo-european? I thought it wasn't. Maybe I'm mistaken though.
I don't know that my solution works, but it's a stab at it.
It's not for beginners, though, and there's no emphasis on pronunciation (yet).
Just don't attempt to learn Kanji in the order Japanese school-children do. They learn it in the order of conceptual difficulty, not difficulty of writing or frequency of use. Adults should learn Kanji by commonality and difficulty of writing, since our brains have already learned to grasp difficult concepts in our native tongue.
As for learning kanji by writing by hand, that's actually my own m.o. when dealing with an assignment (i.e., I write all the words out longhand before looking up those I don't know).
But digital input methods have become so much of a crutch, that many native Japanese (especially the younger generations) cannot write by hand any more b/c they forget how.
It's called "character amnesia": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_amnesia
Sure, such an absolute statement is an exaggeration, and yeah, it's "debatable," but Japanese themselves seem pretty firmly convinced it's the case.
Practice is necessary to maintain a complex detail-oriented skill, and when many people are doing most of their major writing using keyboards of various sorts, and only writing by hand in very casual and formulaic contexts, there's going to be some fallout.
I think this is rather different from spelling mistakes because spelling mistakes occur regardless of the input method used (computer text entry of western languages is much more "literal" than computer text entry in Japanese). If you write in English at all, regardless of input method, you're going to exercise your spelling ability (even if using a computer lets you spell check, there's still a feedback loop). Japanese text entry using a computer, on the other hand, is completely different than writing by hand; they exercise very different abilities.
This problem is often reported on the news in Japan, and the problem is that people are forgetting things such as: 1) the correct stroke order for difficult kanji 2) the exact radicals in rarely used complex kanji. For example, 薄 and 簿 look similar, but the top radical is different. Confusing these rarely results in someone being unable to understand the desired meaning, but will elicit eye-rolling and chuckles.
It's absolutely not the case that Japanese people can't write by hand anymore.
A better analogy would be cursive writing. Most young Americans can no longer write in cursive. Their handwriting has become simple, inelegant, and they probably don't follow the "correct" way of writing their letters. But they can still write. Just as Japanese can still write.
However, many Japanese people are indeed firmly convinced that Japanese—and particularly young Japanese—have non-trivial problems writing by hand, and that it's because of computer usage. I know this because I hear them say it constantly...
English speakers make more spelling mistakes when typing into a spell-checked document because they know they no longer need to spell correctly.
(A personal anecdote: I used this book one summer to learn and remember about 1500, substantially more than I could use after 6 years of studying Japanese and drilling kanji the usual way.)
If this sounds too good to be true, it's partially because it is. You won't learn much actual Japanese by studying the characters; you'll just learn to associate them with English words. This might be frustrating initially, but if you're committed to becoming proficient in Japanese this will speed up the path substantially. If you've ever seen how quickly native Chinese speakers pick up Japanese, you'll understand why: the Chinese and Japanese languages have about as much relation as Japanese and English. The advantage of the Chinese speakers is that they already know all the Kanji in their native tongue.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Remembering-Kanji-Complete-Japanese-Ch...
Heisig seems to be best as a way just to get all the kanji into your mind as opaque artifacts, just a visual familiarity primarily. Which can be a huge help when you actually start learning Japanese.
For the advanced student looking to master kanji, then a method like Heisig's seems best. However, for those interested in the Heisig method, I recommend this book: Kanji ABC [1]. It is similar to Heisig's but organizes the kanji so that you learn similar kanji together. Also, while Heisig spends much time trying to get you to memorize convoluted association sentences, Kanji ABC simply gives you the radicals (similar to Heisig's 'primitives') and you build your own association sentences.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Kanji-ABC-Systematic-Approach-Characte...
Rosetta Stone - probably spent about 2 months working my way through this.
Language school - 6 weeks, spent most of it feeling utterly confused and wondering why they were trying to teach me Spanish, using fluent Spanish...
Pimsleur - this did really improve my accent and some of the words I'd been using along the way started to become second nature. Still a long way from conversational though, did this for about 4 weeks.
Michelle Thomas - by far the best of the bunch for learning grammar, by the end of the basic and advanced courses I pretty much knew the various past/future tenses. Great base, but conversation still isn't happening...
Memrise - yeah actually, this really did help my vocabulary, spent about a month using it before christmas, learnt a lot and I can see me using this in the future to expand my vocab.
Duolingo - a good base for getting started, not sure how much if sticks though, it has the "lack of context" problem.
Private tutor - this is hands down the winner. I've only had a few lessons but I find this really works for me. The big difference is you can have conversations with complete understanding of every word that is said by either of you i.e. if you don't understand a word they say, they can write it down for you, explain what it means (falling back to english if necessary but generally avoided) and then move on. Likewise, if you make an error in something you've said it's corrected on the spot, often going off on tangent to explain some grammar before continuing the conversation. If you want to learn at a consistent pace I think a private tutor is really the only way to go. You're trying learn to converse in a foreign language, until computers can do the conversation bit the other approaches are all going to fall short of the mark. That's not to say they don't have value, and they're obviously far cheaper than a private tutor but without the conversation part they're never going to be enough to get you speaking fluently.
I'm convinced that learning a language without complete immersion in culture is doable for easy languages such as English, French, Spanish, but almost impossible for Mandarin, Russian, Polish and others. I'm a native Russian speaker and i can confidently tell you that 70% of native Russian speakers cannot speak proper Russian, mangle vocabulary and sentence structure. I'd say something like 90% cannot use proper grammar. This is after 11 consecutive years of taking Russian in elementary, middle and high schools. This got really bad after the collapse of Soviet Union, which took Russia's impressive Soviet-era education system with it.
Obviously, the older you are the worse it gets. I took English lessons for 4 years in Russia. In the end, i could barely put a sentence together. After immigrating to the US, I picked up English at 14 in less than a year and got to the point of losing any kind of identifiable accent. If i tried to learn it today i would likely never reach the level of fluency i'm enjoying now.
Having said that, I've only ran into one American who actually spoke Russian possibly better than I did (my Russian is significantly worse now than at 14). It was an intelligence agent who interviewed my father when we came to the US 14 years ago. So our government likely has a few tricks up their sleeves.
http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/Wha...
But a speaker of one language who is past the age of puberty will simply not perceive many of the phonemic distinctions in sounds in the target language (the language to be learned) without very careful training, as disregard of those distinctions below the level of conscious attention is part of having the sound system of the speaker's native language fully in mind. Attention to target language phonemes has to be developed through pains-taking practice.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10442032
It is brutally hard for most people (after the age of puberty, and perhaps especially for males) to learn to attend to sound distinctions that don't exist in the learner's native language. That is especially hard when the sound distinction signifies a grammatical distinction that also doesn't exist in the learner's native language. For example, the distinction between "I speak" and "he speaks" in English involves a consonant cluster at the end of a syllable, and no such consonant clusters exist in the Mandarin sound system at all. Worse than that, no such grammatical distinction as "first person singular" and "third person singular" for inflecting verbs exists in Mandarin, so it is remarkably difficult for Mandarin-speaking learners of English to learn to distinguish "speaks" from "speak" and to say "he speaks Chinese" rather than * "he speak Chinese" (not a grammatical phrase in spoken English).
Most software materials for learning foreign languages could be much improved simply by including a complete chart of the sound system of the target language (in the dialect form being taught in the software materials) with explicit description of sounds in the terminology of articulatory phonetics
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Articulatory_phonetics
with full use of notation from the International Phonetic Alphabet.
http://www.langsci.ucl.ac.uk/ipa/ipachart.html
Good language-learning materials always include a lot of focused drills on sound distinctions (contrasting minimal pairs in the language) in the target language, and no software program for language learning should be without those. It is still an art of software writing to try to automate listening to a learner's pronunciation for appropriate feedback on accuracy of pronunciation. That is not an easy problem.
After phonology, another huge task for any language learner is acquiring vocabulary, and this is the task that most language-learning materials are most focused. But often the focus on vocabulary is not very thoughtful.
The classic software approach to helping vocabulary acquisition is essentially to automate flipping flash cards. But flash cards have ALWAYS been overrated for vocabulary acquisition. Words don't match one-to-one between languages, not even between closely cognate languages. The map is not the territory, and every language on earth divides the world of lived experience into a different set of words, with different boundaries between words of similar meaning.
The royal road to learning vocabulary in a target language is massive exposure to actual texts (dialogs, stories, songs, personal letters, articles, etc.) written or spoken by native speakers of the language. I'll quote a master language teacher here, the late John DeFrancis. A couple years ago, I reread the section "Suggestions for Study" in the front matter of John DeFrancis's book Beginning Chinese Reader, Part I, which I first used to learn Chinese back in 1975. In that section of that book, I found this passage, "Fluency in reading can only be achieved by extensive practice on all the interrelated aspects of the reading process. To accomplish this we must READ, READ, READ" (capitalization as in original). In other words, vocabulary can only be well acquired in context (an argument he develops in detail with regard to Chinese in the writing I have just cited) and the context must be a genuine context produced by native speakers of the language.
I have been giving free advice on language learning since the 1990s on my personal website,
http://learninfreedom.org/languagebooks.html
and the one advice I can give every language learner reading this thread is to take advantage of radio broadcasting in your target language. Spoken-word broadcasting (here I'm especially focusing on radio rather than on TV) gives you an opportunity to listen and to hear words used in context. In the 1970s, I used to have to use an expensive short-wave radio to pick up Chinese-language radio programs in North America. Now we who have Internet access can gain endless listening opportunities from Internet radio stations in dozens of unlikely languages. Listen early and listen often while learning a language. That will help with phonology (as above) and it will help crucially with vocabulary.
The third big task of a language learner is learning grammar and syntax, which is often woefully neglected in software language-learning materials. Every language has hundreds of tacit grammar rules, many of which are not known explicitly even to native speakers, but which reveal a language-learner as a foreigner when the rules are broken. The foreign language-learner needs to understand grammar not just to produce speech or writing that is less jarring and foreign to native speakers, but also to better understand what native speakers are speaking or writing. Any widely spoken modern language has thick books reporting the grammatical rules of the language,
http://www.amazon.com/Mandarin-Chinese-Functional-Reference-...
http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Comprehensive-Grammar-Grammars...
http://www.amazon.com/Comprehensive-Grammar-English-Language...
http://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-Grammar-English-Language/dp/...
and it is well worth your while to study books like that both about your native language(s) and about any language you are studying.
P.S. I'm puzzled about the pattern of upvotes and downvotes on my first comment in this thread (which was the first comment posted, when it wasn't clear whether this story would move from the new page to the main page here on HN.) I'm not aware of any factual mistakes in the first comment I posted here, which was a response to the submitted article, nor anything about it that violates the Hacker News guidelines.
Do you think people who grow up bilingual have an advantage in this area? Not necessarily just because they have a larger set of phonemes to fall back on, but because they may find it easier to notice differences and recognize new ones? ("this is language specific" understanding vs. "this is how it always is")
Also, your comment about reading touches on a project I've been working on (and have shelved for about a year). If you don't mind I'd love to hear what you think, I'll dust it off and send you an email once I get the prototype up and running again.
To answer your direct question, my anecdotal observation is that people who are native bilinguals enjoy a life-long advantage in further language learning, which makes sense on theoretical grounds. I'm not sure to what degree this hypothesis has been put to the test in the research literature on language acquisition, some of which I have read.
That said, I think every second-language learner (even those who will never learn a third language) could benefit from being taught the entire international phonetic alphabet, to aid them in mentally placing (inside the mouth) the sounds they're supposed to be making.
Knowing the difference between 'a' (unrounded open front) and 'ɐ' (unrounded near-open central) vowels helped me when learning the Cantonese phonetic system. Just knowing all the sounds that are "available" and knowing which of those sounds the target language uses is very useful.
That said, this comment in particular is pretty much spot on, and is perfectly relevant to the discussion at hand.
One of the frustrations I've always had as an adult male trying to learn languages is that many of the teachers don't actually have the linguistic training to describe some of the phonetic and grammatical distinctions they are trying to teach. For instance, when learning French, I was trying to figure out the liaison and enchainment system; and for the most part, it actually adheres to some fairly universal phonetic principles (though there's a bit of confusion do to the fact that there are some prestige dialect rules which get over-applied to sound more formal, which actually cause you to break those more regular and universal rules; this is not dissimilar to English in which prescriptivists try to over-apply certain grammatical rules to cases in which they just don't make sense). But I could never actually discuss this with my French teachers, because none of them had any kind of education in phonology and so didn't know anything about the terminology or rules.
It surprises me that many of those who teach language don't have any kind of formal training in how language actually works, how languages differ, and the like. Mostly, they are someone who is just a fluent speaker who happens to have studied a good deal of literature in the language.
Edit to add: ah, I just realized that you were talking about your earlier comment, about the list of languages and their similarity. I'm not sure why people would have downvoted that. My experience is that asking or complaining about downvotes on sites like Hacker News (or others where people vote anonymously, like Reddit or Stack Overflow/Stack Exchange) is generally fruitless; if the person wanted you to know why they had downvoted, they would have left a comment about it. If you have to ask, whoever downvoted probably isn't paying enough attention to respond. And asking and/or complaining about it can lead to the thread being somewhat derailed, like this one is starting to be (which is partly my fault for responding). So I've since stopped asking about downvotes; if I know what to fix, I fix it, if not, I just move on with my life.
I found immersion to be orders of magnitude better. After a few months in Antigua I probably learned as much as the prior several years. You get so much more out of spending your day just talking in another language. I remember when I stopped trying to translate from English to Spanish and just spoke in Spanish. It's quite a trip to speak so much Spanish that you find yourself hunting for words in English when you switch back. Spanish sometimes came first.
Unfortunately, you'll lose it quickly. My weekend project is to take what I learned and put it on the iPhone and iPad for both myself and others. Shameless plug:
https://itunes.apple.com/app/id388918463
I've got more content that I used to create a rather ugly website, which I'm about to turn off that I will eventually put in the app. I'll spare everyone that link. :-)
I'm also the founder of language startup called http://www.nativetongue.com If you are interested check us out. We combine language learning with gaming, to make it fun and addictive. We have the following apps available:
- Learn Chinese with Mandarin Madness http://itunes.apple.com/app/mandarin-madness/id494800742
- Learn Spanish with Spanish Smash https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/learn-spanish-spanish-smash/...
I think the ultimate would be learning like Neo in Matrix. Just plug a cord into the back of your head and upload the mandarin lesson module, and absorb it in seconds!
I do think the system has it flaws but it is definitely a big improvement over everything that has come before. I think the future of language learning will resemble Rosetta Stone but that it will use machine learning to be more dynamic and adapt itself to things that you are having trouble with, perhaps it will seem more 'croudsourced'. Before Rosetta Stone I was making zero progress with German, after one year using a CD/Book approach I was continually forgetting vocabulary, unable to pronounce things, etc, etc. There is something about Rosetta Stone that is almost like falling into hours of mindless gaming. It never seems too hard to get stuck but it just keeps on pushing what I know little by little. I think that they should use photoshop to make their pictures more cheaply. Also, the milestone segments seem pretty worthless. Sometimes it would be nice to see the grammar of a practice sentence diagrammed so that I could go and read an analytic description of the grammar point.
For German more than for Spanish I'm finding it helpful to treat the Rosetta Stone as a supplement to other approaches especially as the grammar confuses me a great deal.
So while the program is expensive (I paid $500 for Spanish on disks and $329 for one year of online only access to the German) it is the only thing I have found worth spending money on short of immersion. If you have a 9-5 job then most likely Rosetta Stone will be a good time vs cost trade off. That has been my experience so far.
Language learning schools are popular because they're in fun places with lots of other interesting young people.
Watching a YouTube video kind of sucks the fun out of language learning worse than flashcards do. Not that language learning in and of itself is fun to begin with.
Let me know if anyone's interested.