You've been learning English for some time now. You're still doing great, but lately your enthusiasm isn't as strong as it used to be. You feel a little tired and find it ever harder to focus. Abandoning the study is not an option, so you're asking yourself: "Is there anything I can do to regain my rhythm?"

First of all, don't feel guilty and don't freak out: this is a natural disposition.

Eventually, fatigue will show its signs in any prolonged effort, and learning a foreign language definitely requires a sustained intellectual effort. Therefore, there is nothing wrong with taking a short break every now and then. Just make sure you are not overindulging in these breaks, of course.

Then, the good news: there are ways of keeping you on your learning track without necessarily overworking your brain.

In this series, Challenger offers you some tips that will help you add some flavor to your learning and thus retain the joy of learning English. As you might havealready guessed, they consist mainly of a balanced, meaningful mix of work and fun.

So, ready to spice up a little your learning methods?

1 in 60,000

Consider this ratio for a moment. It's a low, low ratio, yet it is about you, and me, and every human out there.

60,000 is roughly the number of identified species of vertebrates¹ (of which only one tenth are mammals), while 1 is the exact number of species employing natural language for general-purpose communication.

It is not difficult to see how the use of natural language is among the most conspicuous traits that distinguish us, Homo sapiens, from other species with which we share this planet.

When we take into consideration the complexity of language and of the verbal communication act, some fundamental questions arise, like why did language appear in the first place, and why do we use it (what are its functions)?

Linguistics at Work

SOV & SVO. Suppose you are a Japanese student learning English: chances are that you have already encountered these 3-letter groups. It's easy to mistake them for acronysms, but they are in fact called initialisms.

Books and teachers told you that unlike Japanese, which is an SOV (Subject Object Verb) structured language, English is an SVO (Subject Verb Object) structured one. Hence, the strange – strange for you, that is – word order in an English sentence like "Monkeys like bananas".

What Is Linguistics?

All humans achieve competence in whatever language is spoken around them when growing up, with apparently little need for explicit conscious instruction. This seems to indicate that the ability to acquire and use language is an innate, biologically-based potential of modern human beings, similar to the ability to walk.

However, language varies in many aspects and there are also different methods of learning a language. Then what is universal to language, how can it vary, and how do we come to know languages? These are some of the relevant questions to which the science of linguistics tries to offer answers.

So, in a nutshell, linguistics is the scientific study of natural language. The people who concern themselves with describing and explaining the nature of human language are called linguists.