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One thing about my English that I find particularly annoying is that I don't have such a good vocabulary. It's very irritating trembling in the air for the right words to say or have to say or write only the most common words. I'm not able to vary my language and sometimes I feel really stupid repeating the same words over and over again. I keep forgetting the long and unusual words so my way of speaking and writing English gets far to uncomplicated and boring. 
I think I learned most words when I was younger and then I "hit the wall" and the learning procedure stopped. Much of it depends on the fact that the responsibility to learn new words has more and more moved over to myself. What I mean is that when you were younger the teacher gave you some words to learn as homework, you went home and practised them so that you wouldn't fail the test a few days later.
But as I went older the teachers gave us books to read and said it was up to us to learn the words you couldn't understand. As always when something cannot be checked and I'm not risking failing a test, I don't do it as much as I should. 

Then I must say I'm better at writing in English because I usually know how to spell the words, if there is a word I'm familiar with and use in my daily life. Perhaps it's because I don't have difficulties with the spelling part in the Swedish language either. 

I enjoy reading English and especially to do it aloud, then it also makes me remember the text much better. I don't check up all the words I don't know, because it takes such a time and the general impression of a novel disappears. 
Though when I'm trying to learn some facts I look the hard ones up in a dictionary, just to be sure I don't miss anything important. 

I can pretty well understand people talking English even though I have difficulties with some dialects and people who speak bad English. When people are saying the wrong word or pronouncing it very bad, I don't find it easy to relate the wrong word into the right one. I also find the British English harder to understand than the American English, most likely since most movies are from the United States and then we get used to the American way of saying things and the accent they have there.

Regarding to my own speech I don't think that I have difficulties in pronouncing English words. I have a pretty good memory in remembering how to pronounce a word the right way if I have heard it a few times before. But referring to words I'm not used to or especially long words, I find it very difficult knowing exactly how to say, because I don't know the rules for it. 
 
In school I have never been given the opportunity to learn rules of how to pronounce English words. The only way of learning this has been to repeat words or sentences after the teacher. My opinion is that teachers these days (regarding to those I have had) don't care so much about the way students pronounce, because they almost never correct them. This is really bad, as you continue with the wrong pronunciation until someone say it to you and give you the right one. Maybe teachers don't correct the pupils as often as they should while they don't want to make them feel bad, and of course there would be no fun hearing the teacher complaining about small slips all the time - that would make anyone feel lousy and stupid. I just want them to correct the biggest slips in order to prevent the students from saying wrong from time to time. 

Furthermore is my accent more like the American English than the British English. Many movies, series, talkshows and even more useful programs like documentaries and news are today from the United States, so media of the American English influences us. It's not strange that we start talking with an accent more alike the American, as we all the time run into it.
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