what am i doing wrong here?

In the challenge you have to return a random letter from a string that's passed into the function. Right now you're passing in the hard coded string 'item'. So just change that so you can handle any string that's passed in. You're also returning the random number. You want a random letter from the string passed in using the random number.

import random

def random_item(item): # now you can pass in any string you want. Whether it be 'item' or 'items' or 'pineapple'
    number = random.randint(0, len(item) - 1)
    return item[number] # returns the random letter NOT the random number.

Does that make more sense?

Yeah that makes a little bit more sense but what about len(good_guesses) != len(list(secret_word) I think the first part says the amount of good guesses is not equal to the second part, but what does the second part say??

I haven't watched the video. But the second part with this:

len(good_guesses) != len(list(secret_word) )

So list says basically make an array. For example: list("secret") becomes ['s', 'e', 'c', 'r', 'e', 't']. It's just a convenient way to make an array. Then you can get the length from that as well. You can play around with that in a python repl as well. Is that what you were wondering?

Hey Eric, I tried the code and it came back with an error, sorry to bother you with all this. just trying to understand it all before moving on if i can.

No worries!, Sorry I forgot the 0 in the randint function!

I dont think so Eric, i guess i didnt give you enough info. words = ['apple', 'banana', 'etc']
secret_word = random.choice(words)

no problems here eric, I appreciate all the help i can get. But what do you think about the len(list(secret_word)) secret_word is a variable that stores a randomly chosen word by the computer?? I been trying to figure out what this statement len(list(secret_word)) says.

From what I gather you'd be correct. secret_word is randomly chosen from the words array. Then turned into a list and then the length is found.