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I suppose what I would consider myself being best at when it comes to English is listening. As long as it is not a doctor or a mecanic trying to explain what they do. I think the reason for that is that it is the one of the four I have been doing for the longest time. My first actuall English lesson I had in the fourt grade but long before that I had gotten used to watching the TV-programs my 5-year older sister watched, where I learned what words sounded like and by reading the subtitles I could figure out what they ment. So by the time my teacher started teaching me words like cat and hat, I already knew long sentences as "Hands up, cowboy or I'll shoot!" This way of learning obviously wasn't the best since you had no way of getting all parts of the language but as far as listening and speaking goes it took me a long way.
As I mentioned above most of my spoken English is from TV, movies and music, mostly American. So when I moved to my America, my boyfriend, whom I met there, had more than a few laughs at my expence when he recognized certain senteces he also had heard and remembered from movies pronounced exactly as they were in the movie. The biggest problem with learning from TV, the way everyday people in America speak, is that when the teachers in elemetary school and also secondary school wanted to teach you their version of what they considered beeing Oxford English, they had no patiens for American English, which was strictly forbidden, and I had little patiens for their, as we say in Sweden, "Swenglish". And since what they teach you there is mostly to be able to speak and understand without knowing the rules behind it I do not feel that I learned anything from them.
When it comes to reading I wouldn't say that I have a problem but this I haven't been practicing to much. I'm afraid I'm going to have to blame this also on school, since the texts you were forced to read always were so boring and instead of pushing you to start reading by letting you read books, I'm now talking about novels and such, that you would ordinary read in Swedish and you had a interest in they made you read books that you would never think of reading and which most likely did not interest you. But during my years in America I didn't have much choise but to read English books so I reluctantly started. In the begining I read Harlequin novels since it doesn't contain that many pages and something is usually happening on every page, then I went on to a little longer books, but still easy to read such as Stephen King books. For me this system worked very well, and now I feel more comfertable reading longer and more advanced books.

Finally we have arrived at my problem area, writing! My big problem here is a combination of lack of imagination, spelling problems and not having learned proper grammar. In 1997 I realised that although I could get by easily with my English in America it would be nice to learn it proparly, so I returned to Sweden to take English, among other subjects, at Kunskapslyftet. This was a big dissapointment though. My teacher wasn't very good at English, in fact she had taken a summer-class just to be able to keep up with the class. And the biggest problem was that since the class was a adult one, no two people had the same knowledge of the language so it was at a rather basic level, and again the emphasis was put on knowing what to say not explaining why. And the essays we wrote felt like they were ment for sixth graders with subjects like "my summer holliday" or "a letter to my best friend". So needless to say this did not improve my writing skills.

So here I am at University, finally going to learn about grammar and other "behind the scenes" things that makes the language work. I feel slightly overwhelmed but I hope that I at least will be able to take in some of it.

The End
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