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<title> "Evaluation" </title>
Introduction
I will in this essay briefly go through some of my past confrontations with the English langu-age. I do this in order to show the level of my English today, to explain my weaker and stron-ger spots and how they were once formed.

English My English
In the year of 1988 my father came home from work with a brand new computer.
- Son, he yelled up to me on the second floor, say hi to Toshiba 2000, the portable PC.
Squealing with joy and anticipation I came down the stairs half running half tumbling. He had been talking about borrowing a computer from his work for almost a whole year and it finally came true.

With this piece of powerful machinery (with a vast hard disc space of 20 megabytes) I had my first experiences using English. My father also brought with him a computer game called "Spa-ce Quest" in which you play a little man and are supposed to type commands in English in or-der to guide him through a space-adventure. I was so excited over this new game I forgot I hardly knew any English. I played and I played and in a couple of weeks I had increased my vocabulary enormously and started to get a hang of the English spelling.

When English classes began, in the 4th grade, I was very confident and pretty much ahead of my classmates. I learned quickly and was often encouraged by my teacher. Since no major ob-stacles came in my way, I was growing over-confident which I would become aware of later...

In the 7th grade I noticed that my skills in English were quite average compared to my new classmates. Wanting to be the top student I once were, I started working harder. For as Milli Vanilli once sang: "... when you've had a taste of paradise, back on earth can feel as cold as ice...". Half a semester later, my English still showed no radical improvements and I began to cut classes instead of working harder.

The most important event in my English learning took place in the spring of my 15th year. I decided I would try reading JRR Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" in English. I struggled through the first 100 pages of the book and was on the verge of giving up, but I noticed something. Slowly, very slowly, the reading grew smoother, and I began to discover the poetic superiority of the English language compared to Swedish. Today almost all of my leisure reading is in En-glish.

In the 10th grade I got a new teacher. She made Rudolf Hess seem nice. She demanded dicip-line which in this case meant be-silent-and-listen-or-leave-the-classroom-never-to-come-back. We didn't get along very well, she and I. Each time I opened my mouth she bullied me about my accent and pronounciation. I caught myself thinking through each sentence before I let it pass my lips, and if I was uncertain of a word or a phrase, I chose to stay silent rather than taking a guess. With this my speaking grew more careful and sparse. An american exchange student became my salvation. She and I made good friends, and like most good friends, we had much to talk about. Since her skills in Swedish were extremely limited, we had to speak Eng-lish. She noticed my being formal and stiff when speaking.
- Just talk David, she told me smiling, a few grammatical errors won't kill ya, ya know.
Thanks to her, my speaking became a bit more casual and fluent, though I consider speaking to be my weakest spot in the "art of English". I have a tendency to get stuck on difficult words and my accent is quite horrible. 

I have no larger problems understanding spoken or written English. One drawback in my skills within those two areas though, is that I might be slightly overconfident. I sometimes believe I know a certain word hearing/reading it (though I actually don't know it), and therefore I don't stop to analyse it. This ignorance could mean missing important information.

Writing has never been a strong side of mine, not in English nor in Swedish. My teachers al-ways used to say that my writing lacked a certain flow, maybe that's because I find it very hard to look critically on my own texts. My strongest side in writing English is that I have quite an extensive vocabulary. I've picked up many words watching TV and reading books.

Conclusion
All in all I consider my skills in English good, but it requires some improvements mainly in the speaking and writing departments.
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