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This text will deal with my knowledge in the English language in four different aspects: listening, reading, speaking and writing. 
I never felt that I had a problem to understand the englishteachers in school and now when I listen to lecturers at the university, who use a higher level of the English language then what I'm used to, I still don't have a problem to follow even though they use many words that are new to me. None of the lecturers that I had so far had a dialect that I thought was difficult to understand. Certain dialects that are spoken in some parts of England are sometimes hard to understand. For example if I watch a English movie without Swedish text in which the actors speak a dialect that sounds very different from the English that I learned in school I can have difficulties to understand it. This problem I never had watching movies where the actors spoke any kind of American dialect.I've been to the States for vacation and then I understood all the different kinds of American english that I heard. Unfortunately I never had the opportunity to go to England so I don't know how my understanding would be there but I met quite a few English people in other countries and they used so much slang that I felt rather lost!
When it comes to my reading in English the biggest weakness is probably that I never read, it's not easy to relax and read a book if there are a million other urgent things to do. In the past two weeks I actually red more English then I did for several years. I thought that it was much easier to understand then I expected it to be and that includes both instructions and literary texts. When I speak of understanding I'm not talking about every single word rather the sentences as a whole. Normally you understand approximately what a word means if you have a circumstance to refer to. That doesn't mean that I don't think that I have to learn the word. To improve my English vocabulary is actually one of the two main challenges that I have to deal with this term. 
As improving my vocabulary is one challenge the other one is definately to get a better knowledge about the English grammar. I didn't study English for a long time and it's amazing how fast you forget things that you once knew. Actually I can't even remember having grammar lessons in the "gymnasium", instead my teacher forced us to read "Hamlet", written in a very old English. I can't say that anyone appreciated it then and I really don't think that I developed my knowledge of the English language in a positive way in those years.Partly because of this but also the lack of practice in recent years made me suspect that I'm not very good at English grammar. According to my result on the diagnostic test that we had the first day of this term, my suspicions can be considered as confirmed. Especially the translation part wasn't very good, I really don't understand why the result on that part was worse then others. 
When I write a text like this, the most obvious weakness about my English is that my vocabulary isn't big enough. Actually it's not only unsufficient it doesn't include enough words that are considered as a higher level of English or more professional synonyms to the words that I use.
If there is anything that I would call a strength about my writing that would be my lively imagination that makes it easy to come up with a story for essay or just to start writing, something that most people think is the worst part of the writing process. That is of course nothing special for my writing in English.
To speak is what I'm best at in my knowledge of English. Of course I also have the problem with my insufficient vocabulary when I speak but normally I don't feel the need to use words of a higher level when I'm speaking. 
When I was in school, I didn't say a word more than necessary in the English lessons. I wasn't only shy but also ashamed and unconfident about my English. After finishing school I went abroad for a year, one of the purposes of that was to improve my ability to speak English. The country to which I went, wasn't a English speaking one.
That may sound strange since I wanted to practise English. Anyway that was the idea, I spoke English every day with the people there and because of that it wasn't their mother tongue either I became more self-confident about my English. Now I like to speak English so I'm really satisfied with the out coming of that year. Now I feel ready to work hard to improve my vocabulary.
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