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It's always much easier to evaluate somebody else's skills, to express opinions and give advice when it comes to somebody else's performance within a certain area. When it comes to evaluating your own skills, your own strengths and weaknesses it's not so easy any more. You feel a bit split up between on the one hand what you know and realise is the reality of things and on the other hand what you want the reality to be, i e the way it always has been in your imagination. It's much easier to say that somebody else stinks at something than having to say the same thing about yourself since that means that you firstly have to admit to yourself that you're not perfect. Which you've always thought. To top it all you then have to say it out loud and reveal it to others?! No way! Joking apart, in the following paragraphs I will do my best to describe and assess my own weaknesses and strengths in the skills of reading, speaking, listening and writing in English.
	If we start off with the reading part I can only say that I have always loved English literature and it's my opinion that if possible you should read all literature in the language it originally was written in. So I've read quite a lot of English literature in English, everything from Shakespeare, Austen and Dickens to modern and contemporary writing. Reading is an excellent way of learning a language and I think it has helped me enormously, with every book I read my vocabulary increases. However, during the last two years I've been studying Scandinavian languages and I was more or less forced to cut down on my consumption of English literature, so my English has become slightly rusty and I feel it's high time to start practising my reading of English again.
	In school we were taught British English but we didn't get to do much talking so when I went to England for the first time, as an au-pair, it came as a shock to me how difficult it actually was to express myself in English. I couldn't find the words and it was impossible to apply the grammar exercises from school onto real life. I also became very confused concerning pronunciation and vocabulary because I stayed with an American family but all my friends were British. Basically I got a semi-American vocabulary and a semi-British pronunciation! The following year I went to Oxford for six months to do the Cambridge Exam of Proficiency in English. During that time I lost most of my confusion because the tutors at my school did not approve of semi-American tendencies! Anyway, I no longer have a problem speaking English, it comes quite naturally, but it's surprising how quickly one forgets when not having practised it for a while. I felt like a stuttering idiot last spring when I went to England to visit my friends!
	Listening is what I do best. What I think most non-native speakers do best. Of course local dialects and other odd divergences can be tough but on the whole I don't have any problems with British, American, Australian or Caribbean English. (Southafrican English however is a bit tricky.) I think that my time in Oxford has been a great help because there I met students from all over the world and I learnt how to understand English spoken with all sorts of strange accents. Probably my personal interest in languages and dialects also has something to do with it. If you're really interested in something you try harder to learn and you remember what you've learnt. And what better way to learn than to listen to the people whose mother tongue is English, i e the ones who know what they're doing?
	Apart from reading writing is one of my favourite things to do. In the future I would love to write both imaginative children's books and thick novels about life. (Pretentious, I know!) Naturally I write in Swedish, writing in English is a bit trickier since it's not my mother tongue, it's not the language that first comes to my mind when I want to express myself. However, I'm eager to improve my written English because writing is something quite different from speaking. Once I've put the words on paper they're there where everybody can see them. When I talk they disappear as soon as I've spoken them and even if I made mistakes they're no longer there for people to see! So when I write it's much more important that it looks good and is grammatically correct and that is what I hope to eventually achieve even when writing in English, impeccable grammar and spelling.
	I don't know how well I managed to evaluate my English skills, but as I explained in the beginning I find it extremely difficult to assess myself and my skills. English and languages in general have always been my favourite subjects and over all I feel that after having spent quite a lot of time in England and having spent at least the same amount of time reading English literature, my level of English is high. Nevertheless, I want to improve my English further and there's no doubt in my mind that this course will help me do just that.
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