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It all started in fourth grade. I was ten years old and about to have my first English lesson. How I enjoyed that. I gladly took home my books, in which I had written down the fifteen words that we had to learn for the next week. Since then I have been struggling with learning to be a better speaker, listener, writer and reader of English. It has not always been simple, as you will see. But I have had a lot of fun on the way. 
Throughout high school I did not have any bigger problems with listening and understanding English. To a certain degree I can thank TV for that. I watched many American shows and learned to listen and understand English. When I, after one year of high school, went to the United States to study I got to practice all that I have learned the past seven years. When I first heard my host father speaking, I was shocked and thought, "What is he saying? What language is he talking?" 
But it did not take many days to learn to understand him, and everybody else for that matter. So listening was no problem. Until I was on my way home and we made an intermediate landing at Heathrow Airport, London. 
I was in a shop to buy something to eat, and it was my turn to pay. The cashier started talking to me and I did not understand one word of what she said! Not one single word! She must have thought I was an idiot standing there saying "what?" to everything that she said. It was a big difference from the American English that I had gotten used to. 
Now, though, when I have not been in the United States for several years I have no problem in understanding British English.

In the ten years that I studied English in Sweden, I did not read many books in English, we never had to. But when I was in the U.S I discovered the joy of reading. It is not just fun to sink into an imaginary world and forget the reality, it is also a very good way of keeping up and learning a language. I remember lying in my bed reading an English book and thinking for myself. Wow, I am reading a book in a totally different language, and I understand everything. It was an amazing feeling. 
So reading is not a big problem for me.

I do have problems with my writing though. My grammar is not the best, even though I think I write perfectly well. I feel quite competent in spelling, but of course there are many difficult words in English too, as there are in every language. 
One of my first writing experiences is when I was around ten or eleven years old. A friend and I were going to write a letter to "DJ Cat" on the "DJ Cat Show" on the Sky Channel. We liked his show very much so we wanted to write and tell him that. I remember one sentence in particularly. We were going to write "we like you very much", but we did not know how to spell the word much. We pondered and pondered upon how it was spelt. Finally we came up with a quite logic one, at least we thought so. We wrote "we like you very match". Hopefully I have improved my writing since then. 

I am certainly a better speaker after spending a year in the U.S. I have improved my ability to speak spontaneously. I love to speak English, even though I say many things wrong. Which happened a few times in the U.S. The English I had learnt in Sweden did not always work over there. I remember asking my host mother for a rubber. She stared at me and asked if I meant that I needed an eraser. She explained the difference, and I felt a little embarrassed, since the word rubber means "suddgummi" in British English but condom in Am. Eng. 
I still laugh about it and now I feel more confident in my talking, knowing that we all say the wrong things now and then.

In conclusion I could say that I know English quite well. I can survive in an English speaking country without any problems. But there are also lots that I do not know about English, but that I am eager to learn about, to apply the grammar correctly, for instance. 
I am willing to work hard to achieve the goals I have set. And I know that if I do, 
I will be a better speaker, listener, writer and reader of the English language.
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