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<title> English, My English! </title>
Introduction
To write about ones skills when it comes to a language isn't as easy as it first may appear. There are so many things that come into mind that it is impossible to put it all down on a piece of paper with a limited number of words. 

In the following pages I will try to give you a sincere picture on how I started learning English, what I think about the language, and my strength and weaknesses in using it. 
My fascination with the English language started right at the beginning in the fourth grade as our English teacher uttered the first words of English in our class. Or was it in the seventh grade? I can't quite remember. It all seems so long ago, so three years here or there doesn't really matter. Or does it? Anyway, my fascination grew over the years and by the time I was in senior high school I spoke English rather well and understood most of it without any problems. As for my writing and reading skills, well, they were all but good. I think this was mostly due to my problems with English grammar. It seemed as I had some serious trouble with grasping the contents of our grammar books in those days. 

Lets now go back a little further in time, to the year 1989. I was fifteen years old, just an ordinary teenager in a modern society. I remember that year rather well because they had just installed cable TV in our house and it was the first time I could actually watch some American "soaps". That year I also made my first trip to England. It was one of those language trips that you can go on when you're a teenager and spend a few weeks of your summer holiday in school. At my arrival to Torquay, which was our destination, I met my hosts, a young couple with a little baby, and was almost immediately ushered off to school. There I found out, to my dismay, that I wasn't as good at English as I thought. So, during the remainder of the year I spent I don't know how many hours in front of the television. It later revealed it self that during the time I had spent watching television I had actually increased my vocabulary immensely. Now that my skills in listening to the English spoken language and speaking it my self had started to grow, I was clearly aware of my problems with reading and writing in English. Though I had no trouble with spelling those words and phrases we had as homework in school, or reading a few lines in the textbook in class, but in a broader sense, for example reading a longer text (a novel perhaps) and understanding its content or writing a letter grammatically correct... well that I had not yet mastered. (Mind you, I was only fifteen.) 

Two years later it was time for my second language trip to England, this time to the Isle of Wight, and to my surprise it turned out to be a success. I was actually best in class that year. One little funny thing happened one evening when my "host-family" and I had finished dinner. "Would you care for some more potato?", the father in the family asked. And I answered with a polite smile, "No, thank you. I'm quite fed up". As soon as I said those words I knew it was the wrong thing to say. Keith, the father, chuckled and said, "I think you mean 'full up'". Boy, was I embarrassed. 

In the last year of senior high school (1993) I jumped at the chance to write something in English. It was time to write our "special report" (an essay) and I chose to write about the English language and its origin. For the first time I really tested my skill in reading a book and actually understand its content and then write about my so called discoveries. Needless to say, I passed.

Now it's 1999. During the years that have gone by I've been to England a few times and have studied "software engineering" at Uppsala university for four years (almost all literature was written in English). In conclusion I'd say my skills in reading, writing, listening, and speaking English have developed rather nicely. In term of weaknesses I do admit that I still have some grammatical problems, but nothing that can't be helped and when it comes to the pronunciation of some words my tongue just won't co-operate. On the other hand I'd say my strength is my vocabulary and me being so talkative.
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