totally lost

You need to create a method called countWords that exists for the myString Object. You kinda got that part, but you need to change the name countTheWords to simply countWords.

countWords needs to do two things:

1. It needs to access value of the string that the property 'string' of myString contains. In other words, we need to be able to get the "Programming with Treehouse is fun!", or whatever else that property might become.

2. We need to find a way to get the number of words exist in that string, and return an integer representing this.

To tackle the first step, we need to use the this keyword.

• https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Operators/this
• https://teamtreehouse.com/library/understanding-this-in-javascript
• https://www.w3schools.com/js/js_this.asp

This gives us access to the internal properties of the myString class from within. It looks like this:

const myString = {
    string: "Programming with Treehouse is fun!",
    countWords: function(){
        return this.string 
    }
}

Now if we run myString.countWords we'll get back the value of 'string', that's a good first step.

Now that we know we have access to the string property, we need to count the words in it. This can be divided into two further steps:

1. Figure out how to split the string into "words"
2. Count and return the number of words

Step one can be done a few ways, but I prefer the string.split() method javascript comes with. Checkout https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/String/split Quickly, this method works as follows:

"I am a big string, make me into words".split(' ') //Split on empty spaces (this is what makes a word) =>
//['I', 'am', 'a', 'big', 'string,', ... 'words']

Next we can access the length of the array we created by splitting the string using the built in length method: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Array/length

['I', 'am', 'a', 'big', 'string,', ... 'words'].length //get the length
//9

Once we return that, our method is complete. All together, that looks like this:

const myString = {
    string: "Programming with Treehouse is fun!",
    countWords: function(){
        const wordArray = this.string.split(' ');
        return wordArray.length;
    }
}

Hope that helps you, and anyone else that's struggling with this question!

This did it for me.

const myString = {
    string: "Programming with Treehouse is fun!",
        countWords: function(){
              return this.string.split(' ').length;
  }
}