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I was assigned to appraise my own capability in English concerning four skills; listening, reading, speaking and writing. Strengths and weaknesses are to be explored in the text below. The answers corresponding to each area have one distinct concept in common; they all depend on the situation, and various situations demand a matching language. One can have great fluency in casual English while having trouble using more formal English, which is why I will explain my competence referring to examples. 
I find it rather difficult to elucidate my skills in listening to English since that is particularly depending on the situation. Of course, I find understanding spoken English more difficult than Swedish. For example I have problems comprehending people speaking English poorly at times, while I understand immigrants in Sweden perfectly. Dialects can be troublesome as well, but usually they only need getting familiar with. When hearing a native as Mr Glover for instance, I have no difficulties following except when words out of my vocabulary are being used. Obviously it's preferable when the speaker keeps a nice and slow pace. Though, my ability to understand speedy spoken English has ameliorated since I watch TV a lot. In Sweden we don't dub television and that way we hear English daily which is a great privilege and I undoubtedly believe that this has improved my hearing comprehension. I think that having a narrow vocabulary is my largest weakness while being able to understand unknown words by the context is a strength of mine.
When it comes to reading, my skills vary a lot. For many years now I have chosen the English version of a book instead of the translated one and it has worked fine. I have also read rather a lot old English in the works of Jane Austin and Shakespeare and I had no problems doing that either. However, when it came to reading mathematics and physics at university I suddenly found wide gaps in my vocabulary. Even reading pretty simple technical language became an impediment for me. It was quite boring as well reading page after page covered with scientific terms. Perhaps that added some difficulty to the task. I am not a quick reader and when I come across unknown words I don't look them up although I should. It is too time consuming. Instead I have become a master of interpretation by the context. In my case it is a strength doing more harm than good since it keeps me from developing my vocabulary.

Unfortunately, I have a tremendously annoying tendency to stutter when I am nervous. The sentences are grammatically correct and fairly advanced in my mind, but they are seldom spoken in the same manner, mainly because of my fear of making mistakes. My spoken language therefore depends on the listener. When talking to people whose English is inferior to mine I scarcely make mistakes, but I am bound to make errors in conversations with strangers, native English speakers and English teachers for instance. It often takes a while before I am confident enough to speak faultlessly but when so I try really hard not to repeat myself, to use synonyms in order to broaden the active part of my English. This is actually something I am very proud of but not always successful in. When it comes to bad habits there must be lots of them in my speech, but I don't know of any common faults in particular. Hopefully this is something my teachers can help me with.

I feel most confident about writing. There is time to think everything through properly, to double check grammar, look up words and find synonyms in dictionaries. Only I have had very little practice and the few essays we had to compose in school were most likely lightly corrected. I feel very insecure when asked to write memos, formal letters and suchlike because first of all it is difficult to know which words are considered formal and secondly the only practice I have had is correcting my father's business letters. I believe the latter has improved my English as well, because then the whole family discusses the errors and the sentence structures.

My largest weakness when it comes to English in general is the grammatical part. I have a sense of English grammar, but no knowledge of grammatical structure and I hardly know of any rules. The sense mentioned above is my greatest strength. I usually feel when something is incorrect, but sense is very different from knowledge and I am now determent to learn how English is built up.
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