Mind your language!

If English is your mother tongue, then you are fortunate in having acquired a valuable research tool without ever having thought about it. In fact, you were probably using English at the age of 2 or 3 with no problem. So next time you find it hard writing up your research, console yourself with the thought of your less fortunate colleagues in the same situation who had to learn English as a foreign language. The Duchess may have told Alice in Lewis Carol's Alice in Wonderland to care of the sense, and the sounds will take care of themselves, but she obviously wasn't thinking about non-native English speakers.