Category Archives: Polish

My quest to learn the Polish language and about my Polish heritage.

Why Am I Learning Polish?

Journal, Music Playlists, Polish

My family is Polish.

When I was a child, I would always hear my mom and grandmother speak Polish together, but since their husbands were both monolingual English speakers, they mostly spoke English when their husbands were around so that nobody would feel excluded.

Me, age 10, wearing traditional Polish dress.

The way they tell it, I was bilingual as a small child, but since English was the dominant language at home, my vocabulary never really expanded beyond that of a toddler’s. The fact that I never really learned how to speak Polish has always felt like something of a family shame.

In fact, it’s not unusual for the children of immigrants to lose their heritage language, unless tremendous efforts are made to preserve it and pass it on. My experience is pretty similar to that of Marissa Blaszko of Relearn A Language, who grew up speaking Polish but who lost her native language when she started attending her English-only public school. (If anyone else is in the situation of wanting to relearn their heritage language, I highly recommend her website and her YouTube channel @Relearnalanguage!)

“I had no idea that the language could be so easily lost,” my mom said. “For some reason, I thought it was just going to be transferred to you in utero. I thought that because I spoke Polish, you would also speak Polish.”

It’s hard to explain how deeply I yearned to speak Polish. The sound of the language is like poetry to my ears. It is the sound of love, of my mother, of laughter, of warm food, of soft hugs and kisses, and of being cared for. For me, the language of love is Polish.

I would have dreams in Polish where I could fluently speak and understand the language. And then when I would wake up and feel so disappointed, because the language-barrier was back. Not being able to speak Polish felt like there was a wall cutting me off from a whole section of myself. Not having access to this beautiful romantic, cherished language was like not having access to a piece of my own soul.

Multiple times throughout my childhood, I would try to learn Polish. But we didn’t live in a place with a large enough Polish community to offer external support. There were no Polish Saturday schools in our area. Polish is such a minority language that it was really hard to acquire study materials. Polish was not one of the foreign languages taught at my high school. (Or at my college, or at my graduate school.)

So we’d start at square-one—over and over again. Just naming things around the house. Bread; chleb. Tea; herbate. Food; jedzenie.

We never got very far.

The amount of times I would need vocabulary repeated far outstripped everybody’s patience. We didn’t know it then, but what I needed was a spaced repetition system (SRS). Spaced repetition is a learning technique where you basically get reminded of something at ever-increasing intervals until it moves into long-term memory. But we didn’t have these tools then. It was just me and my mom and my grandma, walking around the house naming things. Within a few days, all efforts would be abandoned. I would feel stupid, and everyone would feel frustrated.

When I was in college, I decided to study abroad to learn more about my Polish roots. Unfortunately, my school didn’t have a direct relationship with any universities in Poland. The closest I could get was Charles University in Prague—which is in the Czech Republic. (Not Poland, but at least on the same continent!)

Before my semester began, I spent a month traveling in Poland. My grandmother had a couple of contacts in Warsaw and Krakow, and these two women were my hosts. They took me all over: Warsaw, Malbork castle, Gdansk, Krakow, the Wieliczka salt mines, Zakopane, and the Tatra Mountains.

Me, Warsaw
Me, Malbork Castle

Getting to visit Poland for a month was an incredibly meaningful experience to me. It touched a deep place in my heart to hear the language surrounding me, spoken everywhere. And I even started to pick it up, because the sounds and grammar were so familiar to me from when I was a baby.

Chocholowska Valley, Photo by Dawid Zawiła on Unsplash

And it was exciting to me to see modern Poland. It is sometimes said that people know more about Mars than about Poland. Poland is a medium-sized country of 41 million people. It has a larger population than Greece, Canada, Taiwan, Sweden, and Australia—and yet few Americans could find it on a map. The Western perception of Poland is frozen time with black-and-white photos of World War II rubble and communist block housing.

Warsaw, Photo by Kamil Gliwiński on Unsplash
Gdansk, Photo by Sebastian Huber on Unsplash

But then my semester started. I had to go to Prague—which was a wonderful experience, but it didn’t bring me any closer to learning Polish. When I returned to America a few months later, I was glad to be reunited with my family, but I also felt tremendously sad at leaving Europe. I felt like my time there was not yet finished.

When I was a graduate student earning my MFA in creative writing at San Francisco State, I made another attempt to learn Polish. And this time I got further than ever before. I studied the Pimsleur audio recordings, which used an audio-only spaced repetition system. That year, I was finally able to have rudimentary conversations in Polish with my mother and grandmother.

This was a good start, but the Pimsleur language course only stopped after only 30 lessons, and then I was stuck again.

Occasionally, I would try to write letters and translate recipes, using Google Translate, but at the time (in the early 2010s) it was a terrible translator.

It would be another ten years before I studied Polish again.

So what changed?

Firstly, I underwent a series of traumatic health issues. You can read more about that here, but the upshot was that I became much more pro-active and intentional about my health and well-being. 

One of the things that was especially transformative for me was strength training. This was something I never thought I would do, and yet week after week I was constantly surprising myself by doing things I never thought my body could do. I saw amazing benefits applying consistent pressure over a long period of time. 

It was incredibly empowering. My body felt transformed, but I was also noticing inner benefits.

“You are braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think.”

A. A. Milne

I was two years into my strength-training journey, when the thought occurred to me, If I can do this, what else can I do?

There is a saying that the best time to plant a tree is 10 years ago. The second best time to plant a tree is today. The same can be said of language learning. So I dug in my heels and decided that this time, I was finally going to learn Polish and I wasn’t going to stop until I could speak it fluently.

My 40th birthday was a few years away, and this was a gift I wanted to give my future 40-year-old self.

(I also committed to finally following through with all my paperwork to confirm my Polish citizenship and get my Polish passport. My son and I both qualify for dual-citizenship, but the paperwork is a multi-step, multi-year process…and I’ll leave that for another blog post.)

It was around this time that I saw this Kurzgesagt video: “Changing Your Life—One Step at a Time.” There is a moment in the video that talks about becoming the person you want to be with daily habits to shorten the distance between who you are and who you want to be. One of the examples they give is of learning a language while doing push-ups. And I thought, I could do that.

Thankfully, language learning technology has come a long way since the last time I attempted to learn Polish.

I started with the Duolingo, which had finally created a Polish course. 

Duolingo is an excellent, free language learning program that gives you quick 3-minute immersive language lessons that are in a gamified format. Duolingo is so good that students can actually learn a language faster with Duolingo than if they were taking a college class. The sentences are funny, the courses are built around spaced repetition, so that they remind you of a word just when you are about to forget. And you can look up words if you need to: no judgement.

I love Duolingo and I’ve even gotten the rest of my family hooked. My husband is learning Spanish. My mom is learning Italian. As of this writing, my son has a Duolingo streak that is more than 460 days long in Polish and Spanish!

Starting in July 2022, I studied like a mad woman, fueled by 30+ years of existential frustration. For an entire month, I was working at a pace of one whole unit a day. I was studying three hours a day at least, sometimes more. I studied until my brain felt like mush. 

I completed the entire Polish Duolingo course less than 100 days. There were only 42 units in the Polish course (as opposed to 400 units in Spanish) but this was enough to finally get me over the hump!

In language, learning terms, getting to the end of Duolingo, plus having studied Pimsleur probably put me at the late beginner, CEFR A2 level. If you want to know what the CEFR levels are, you can watch this helpful video by Olly Richards. When I went to spend Christmas with my mother and grandmother that year, I was able to have full on conversations with them in Polish, and start reading simple graphic novels.

After completing Duolingo, I started doing a whole bunch of research about what to do next. Marissa Blaszko at Relearning a Language has a great resource for putting together your own language-learning plan. I found a whole host of amazing resources for learning polish, which I will link down below.

This is my current learning strategy:

Learn 10 new words a day from a frequency dictionary using the Anki mobile app.

According to Paul Pimsleur’s book How to Learn a Foreign Language, the slowest part of language acquisition is learning new vocabulary and moving that vocabulary from short term memory to long term memory. He recommends aiming to learn about 10 new words a day. It’s possible to do more, but given that language learning usually takes a few years, most people can sustainably do about new 10 words say. That has been the most comfortable pace for me.

One of the best way to get those new words into long-term memory is to used a spaced-repetition system. I like using Anki, which is basically a flashcard app, favored by language learners and medical students.

I put a lot of effort into making high-quality flashcards, but once I have them all set up, the daily practice of studying new words usually takes less than 30 minutes, spread out in short bursts throughout the day.

Choosing which words study is incredibly important for making progress because not all words are used equally. As Nathaniel Drew explains in this video, it’s best to focus on an essential core of vocabulary and then extend that in widening circles.

I’ve been putting my flashcards together using this series of Polish Frequency Dictionaries:

– Book 1: Polish Frequency Dictionary: Essential Vocabulary (2500 Most Common Polish Words) — This book has been invaluable for setting up my flash cards because it provides the 2,500 most common words in Polish, along with a example sentences so that you can read how it is used in context.

As of December 2023, I’m currently about two-thirds of the way through studying this book and I have been astonished at how effective it has been in expanding my vocabulary.

By the time I finish studying this book, my vocabulary will be big enough to know 92% of spoken Polish, and 82% of written Polish.

When I finish studying this book, I may continue with the series with Book 2: Intermediate Vocabulary (2501-5000 Most Common Polish Words) and Book 3: Advance Vocabulary (5001-7500 words) or I will take a break and focus on adding words I’m learning from reading novels.

Grammar study with the help of ChatGPT

Polish grammar is different than English grammar. It has seven grammatical cases, and it doesn’t have a lot of articles. Instead, the beginnings and endings of the words themselves change to indicate what is happening in the sentence. Basically this means that it is complicated enough to warrant getting grammar books and just slowly plugging through them, one lesson at a time.

– Marissa Blaszko recommends the Krok po Kroku textbook series. However, this book is written all in Polish, which is great in some ways…but also intimidating.

Polish grammar resources I have found helpful…

  • Basic Polish Grammar by Dana Bielec—Has English explanations of Polish grammar rules, along with plenty of exercises, exceptions, and an answer key in the back.
  • Polish for Dummies by Daria Gabryanczyk—Really breaks down basics of Polish grammar and provides a list of common phrases a person might use while traveling.
  • The Polyglot Club Wiki for language learners — A wikipedia-style website that has lots of mini-lessons to help explain Polish grammar.
  • I also like the Course of Polish YouTube channel because the teacher draws helpful charts and comes up with cute mnemonic devices to help remember the rules.

The biggest help of all has been asking ChatGPT to be my Polish language tutor. This video by Bri Does AI has some helpful tips for how to go about this. My strategy has basically been to ask it things like: 

  • “Can you explain the nominative grammatical case to me?”
  • “Can you give me 25 example sentences of the genitive case, with the words in that case written in bold?”
  •  “I’m going to write 10 Polish sentences in the present tense. Could you rewrite these sentences in the past tense and future tense, and show me in bold what you changed about my sentence to change verb tenses?”

Immersion in 5 main areas

Reading—Years ago, I was really inspired by this blog post on LinguaTrek, which was about the author’s experience of learning Polish by reading Harry Potter. I really love the idea of this method.

I also liked this FluentU article about 9 Useful Strategies for Reading in a Foreign Language. In essence, it recommends you choose a book you really love and go through it in multiple different rounds:

  • Round 1: Get the gist of the passage. Underline words you don’t know, but don’t look them up. Just see if you can figure out what the passage is about. It’s really great to have the audiobook as well, so that you can learn the pronunciation and inflection of what you are reading.
  • Round 2: Slow, detailed read where you look up every single word you don’t know, and make a list to add to your SRS system.
  • Round 3: Once you’ve learned all the new words, read it again.
  • Round 4: Read aloud, either along with an audiobook or with a native speaker. Your aim is for speed and fluency.

I love reading, and I’ve been working up to being able to do more of this. This year I only managed to read five books in Polish (mostly graphic novels or audiobooks), but I’m hoping that I’ll be able to transition to middle grade and young adult novels in this upcoming year. It’s rather difficult to find Polish books in America, so I’ve been ordering them online from The Polish Bookstore online and the Apple Bookstore, which seems to have a wider selection of books in Polish than Amazon or Audible. There are also a handful of public domain Polish classics on LibroVox and the Project Gutenberg.

I’ve also had the language on my phone set to Polish for about a year.

Writing—I’ve been writing weekly letters to my mother and grandmother in Polish, with the help of Google Translate. I’ve also been Bullet Journaling in Polish since September 2022.

Listening— Linsdey Does Languages has a helpful tutorial for setting up your Netflix account to show films in your target language. I’ve set up multiple language accounts for both our family’s Netflix and DisneyPlus accounts. Truthfully, though, I don’t watch much TV so most of my Polish listening has been YouTube channels like Dave z Ameryki, podcasts, music playlists, and audiobooks.

Matt vs Japan has a really excellent YouTube series about how important it is to just create a wall of sound in your target language. His advice is basically to have your target language constantly going in the background, even when doing other things.

I asked ChatGPT to create a music playlist for me based on the music I like. You can listen to that playlist here. What’s neat about YouTube Music is that it will also show the lyrics, so occasionally I will translate the lyrics, if I can’t figure out what the song is about just based on listening.

I found a really cool app (that I haven’t made much use of yet) called LingoClip, which is basically an app that helps you learn language through singing karaoke. Awesome!

Speaking—This is my weakest area. I could be doing so much more, but I’m still quite shy. My mother and grandmother are absolutely thrilled every time I speak to them in Polish, so I aspire to do it more often. This year, I did recently have a conversation with my mom that lasted 30 minutes, all in Polish.

Culture and History—I found this wonderful website called Culture.PL which has excellent articles on Polish history and culture. I subscribe to their newsletter.

I’ve been reading and translating the works of great Polish writers and poets, such as Adam Mickiewicz, Henryk Sienkiewicz, the Witcher series by Andrzej Sapkowski, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk, and Swimming in the Dark by Tomasz Jedrowski.

I’ve also been listening to historical and non-fiction books by English-speaking authors about Poland, such as John Pomfret’s From Warsaw with Love, James Michener’s Poland, James Conroyd Martin’s The Warsaw Conspiracy trilogy, No Simple Victory by Norman Davies, and We Were the Lucky Ones by Georgia Hunter.

Since I’m a writer, I’ve also been reading as much as I can about Polish history, literature, mythology, and about slavic culture for some wonderful books I’m planning on writing at some point in the future.

I have begun writing historical fantasy short stories set in Poland. I hope to collect these interconnected short stories into a book, tentatively called Beads of Amber. I’ll keep you all posted on my progress.

I’m also considering writing an illustrated collection of Polish fairy tales and myths, tentatively titled Slavic Spirits, similar in style to D’Aulaire’s books of Greek and Norse myths.

Who knows what the next few years will bring?

This Is Your Brain on Genre

Journal, Health, Polish

I’ve decided to rewire my brain.

One of the things that I realized when I was writing the stories for What We Talk About When We Talk About the Apocalypse was how naturally the horror-genre voice came out of me. Horror stories are all about imagining the worst-case scenario—and wow am I good at that!

I think writing scary stories came so naturally because I have a slightly anxious personality. I don’t think I have an anxiety disorder, but my mind definitely leans in that direction, sometimes. I recently took the Brain Health Assessment online questionnaire by Dr. Daniel Amen, and it said I had a “cautious” brain type. In reading about that brain type in his book, You, Happier, I was like, “Oh yeah. This is totally me.”

My husband sometimes refers to the voices in his head as his “committee members”—kind of like the characters Joy, Sadness, Fear, Anger, and Disgust from the Pixar movie Inside Out. I think this is a helpful metaphor. Whatever is going on in my mind is just chatter, and the more I recognize it as chatter, the easier it is to ignore the destructive committee members that are not helpful to me.

This is an interesting Peter Attia interview about the process he took in changing his own negative mental chatter.

This brings me back to my changing relationship with my writing, and with genre.

I’ve been a journal-writer since I was eleven years old. Sometimes when I would write in my journal, I would notice myself entering the same old tracks of thought. “This is self-pity mental track #395.” “This is procrastination-busywork mental track #219.” 

I can recognize when I’m on the track, but sometimes I have a hard time getting out of that track. I’ve read that, neurologically, repetitive thoughts are kind of like sledding down a snowy hillside: the more often you ride down those same trains of thought, the deeper the groove gets, and the harder it is to change course. Thanks, brain.

My tendency towards doomsday future-tripping became especially apparent during the pandemic—as I’m sure it did for many of us—when it seemed like the end of the world was literally outside our window. 

These last few years, I’ve also had a number of health problems that have forced me to pause, slow down, and take a long, hard look at my habits—both physical and mental. You can read more about my health journey here.

Back to genre…

When I write horror stories, I find it incredibly cathartic because it’s like I get to take one of my many fears, lift it out of the pile, and let that movie run all the way to the end…usually to a climax scene where a hero figures out how to defeat the villain.

What I love about the horror genre in general—and about Stephen King books specifically—is that those stories are often about resilient characters. They don’t just stop and quiver like frightened rabbits. They fight back.

And one of the classic horror-genre moments is the “Hero at the Mercy of the Monster” scene, where the protagonist has their back against the ropes, all is lost, and they are about to be beaten…but then they somehow find a way to harness their inner gift to defeat the monster.

Usually that inner gift is some variation on “Rationality” or “Cleverness” or “Magic” or “Teamwork” or “the Jungian wisdom of integrating one’s Shadow and thereby triumphing over it”… or whatever theme the author was working with in that story. 

I would say that in 90% of horror stories, good triumphs over evil and the heroes survive. 

(Which is more than can be said about “literary” fiction. I think fictional protagonists have a much higher chance of surviving and finding happiness and meaning if they are in a horror novel than if they are in a literary novel—especially if the protagonist is female. Just think back to all those classics you were forced to read in high school English, and you’ll see what I mean. Antigone dies. Tess dies. Hester dies. Anna Karenina dies. Thanks a lot, AP English!) 

In the rare occasion a horror-novel hero dies at the end, it is usually because they sacrificed themselves to save someone weaker than them. Altruism triumphs over selfishness! Heroes do exist! — And that, my friends, is the meaning of Christmas!

I love this. Horror stories have been great for me because they are a way to externalize fears, dramatize them for entertainment (maybe even laugh at them) and ultimately attain catharsis by triumphing over them.

But that’s not the whole story.

Although writing these scary stories feels powerful, and they bring me a lot of satisfaction and peace for learning how to triumph over a particular fear…I’ve also noticed that they sometimes leave me in a jumpy frame of mind.

There is a reason horror is a niche genre. Not a lot of people like feeling freaked out all the time. Heck, I don’t like feeling freaked out all the time! The whole reason I wrote horror was to get it out of my mind and onto the page, where the monsters in my mind could be defeated and neutralized. 

And I wonder if constantly being on the lookout for horrible things for story material is actually reinforcing the negative confirmation bias in my brain? At what point does writing horror stop feeling cathartic and start feeling like a downward spiral?

A therapist would probably ask, “Does this behavior serve me?” Does this thought pattern of constantly looking out for danger serve me? Does anxiety serve me?

In some respects, yes!

As Dr. Daniel Amen says in his book You, Happier: you actually need a little anxiety to stay healthy. Anxiety is a very useful emotion. Fear for the future is why I exercise every day, eat healthily, and do my best to save for the future. When channeled in the right direction, anxiety can get you off your ass so that you turn in your homework on time.

But too much anxiety is no good. When you spend too much time thinking negatively, there is a danger in shaping your reality in order to confirm those negative thoughts. Confirmation bias. A huge part of our lives is shaped by our attitudes. If you have a bad attitude about your job, you will eventually be fired. If you only recognize the worst in your partner, they will eventually dump you. If all you ever focus on is lack, then you will always feel hunted and frightened no matter how much money you have in the bank. Having a bad attitude can sour any blessing.

What’s the opposite of horror?

For me, it’s romance.

Romance is an absolutely mind-blowing genre to me because the golden rule in that genre is that you have to have a happy-ever-after ending. As a reader, I know it’s coming, but it still surprises me every time. 

You mean sometimes things can actually work out?! No way!

When I started reading romances on a regular basis, I felt as if it were re-wiring my brain for joy. For love. For hope.

It was like in The Music Man musical when Marian Paroo is serenading her heart out to Professor Harold Hill.

There were bells on the hill

But I never heard them ringing.

No, I never heard them at all

’Til there was you.

The music man

I’ll be honest: this is not my brain’s natural tendency. But I want it to be.

I’d rather be an optimist than a pessimist. 

Writing love stories is a lot harder for me than writing horror stories, but they also feel a lot more healing. I cry easily. I feel my chest get warm and melty. And it feels like something I need to be reminded of over and over again—that it’s okay to be loved, to be loving, and to let people care for me.

I’ve heard people say that writers tend to write in the genre that concerns them most.

What genre comes naturally to me? Horror.

What genre would benefit me by causing me to grow the most? Love stories.

To me, writing at the intersection of those two genres is also a powerful combo because Love and Fear have a lot in common. 

(Yes, the heroes in romances are sometimes afraid of silly things, like whether their love interest will still find them lovable and attractive when they put on their glasses, but I digress.)

But on another level, falling in love can sometimes involve overcoming actual terror. 

For example, in my short story, “Angel Man,” I write about a woman who is the survivor of domestic violence learning how to fall in love again when she meets a man who is literally her rebound-angel. He is caring. He is patient. He goes at her pace. He is consistent. And because he is so safe, she is able to heal and slowly overcome her body’s traumata-reflex so that she feels safe being alone with a man again.

“Angel Man” illustrated by E. S. O. Martin

That story was harder for me to write than some of my other scary stories. But it was also more satisfying.

My hope in writing “Angel Man” was that maybe I could rewire the brain of someone who needed this story, so that they could have a metaphor with which to approach healing. Perhaps by getting introduced to “Angel Man” on the page, they could have an easier time finding their own real-life angel man. And perhaps this story could teach a man how to be an angel for someone who needs to take things slow.

And readers unanimously loved this story. It was interesting that out of all the many people who read early drafts of What We Talk About When We Talk About the Apocalypse, “Angel Man” made it into everybody’s top-three favorite stories.

I suppose it’s kind of like that Netflix horror show, Black Mirror. People have strong feelings about that show—but “San Junipero” is everybody’s favorite episode.

So…that was interesting data when it comes to thinking about what types of stories I want to bring to the world. What do I need? What does the world need? It seems like the answer is more stories about love. (And maybe about overcoming fear in pursuit of love.)

In finalizing my collection of stories for What We Talk About, I made the conscious decision to include only the best of what I’ve written during the last seventeen years.

There were half a dozen stories I chose not to include because they were too dark, too pessimistic. The stories worked. They were well-written, if I do say so myself. They absolutely fulfilled genre-expectations for the horror genre… but in reading them, I couldn’t help but think that maybe the world didn’t need more of this?

Or maybe this wasn’t how I wanted my mind to exist anymore. 

I honored that realization in the other stories included in What We Talk About by portraying established couples in “Inheritance” and “Forever House” in using the power of love to overcome horror. In “Library of Unfinished Projects,” I wrote about the love of a family overcoming the horror of aging. In “Prince of Birds,” I wrote about the love a father feels for his son in surviving a harsh and dangerous world. The stories may have scary parts, but there are also loving parts. 

My aim was to be more balanced: scary things happen in this world, but with love and compassion we will triumph. Love can help you transcend your starting circumstances.

Bonus Lesson: Change Your Language, Change Your Brain

In a strange way, learning a new language—Polish—has also helped me become more conscious about my mental chatter and whether my thoughts aid me.

Last year, I started journaling in Polish—with the help of Google Translate app on my phone. It was interesting to notice that learning a new language actually turned my mind into a blank canvas with which to re-evaluate my own vocabulary. As I sat with my open journal, about to engage in a petty compain-a-thon, I thought to myself, “Is this negative vocabulary really what I want to learn and practice in my new language? Hell, no!”

If I’m going to go through all the effort to learn a new language, why not take the opportunity to gift myself a new personality as well?

I’ve heard of people say that speaking and thinking in a different language can change their personality. For example, my mom says that the Polish part of her brain feels more emotional and intuitive—like reading a love letter—whereas the English side feels more cold and logical.

If it’s true that when neurons fire together, they wire together, then couldn’t I consciously create a Polish-speaking version of myself that was happier and more optimistic than the English-speaking version?

So I started bullet journaling and keeping a five-minute gratitude journal…in Polish.

This had the positive effect of allowing me to learn all sorts of awesome vocabulary for what I love about my life in this new language—which I also love. But it also gave the English-speaking side of me a break.

And, presto-change-o, the English side of me started to change as well. I was focusing so hard on noticing positive things with which to write about in Polish, that it felt like the negative-tracks in my English brain were starting to get weaker from lack of use. It’s now easier for me to have positive thoughts in both languages.

Learning a new language is truly a gift that keeps on giving.

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