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<title> To evaluate my own skills in reading, writing, speaking and listening to English </title>
For getting a perfection in the English language more than going for holidays to Great Britain is needed. When you have learned how to write, read, speak and listen to English, then you are much closer the goal to get perfection in the language.

The difficulty in evaluating your own skills in English is not to think of what you do know but what you do not know. For instance, sometimes I do not know the tense of the verb in a sentence and if I am not aware of it then I can not correct it. One way of getting around the problem is to get aware by reading and learning the English grammer.

1 Read

I started reading English at fourth class in compulsory school. At the time I was quite shy and did not talk much during class hour, except if I was asked a question. Much later in life after I had studied French in 1995, I did join a course in English at the Folkuniversitetet in Uppsala. The aim was to get a "First Certificate" in the English language. I managed the examination and got an average grade. The reading part of the exam included reading short stories and answering questions about the stories. I can not say that I have a problem with reading English. English and American literature is familiar from courses I have taken in business economics for 2 years now at the University. 

However, I could learn reading faster as I get to know more English words by looking more thoroughly in the dictionary. Another way to practice reading language is reading more English novels and quality newspapers.

2 Write

The biggest problem for me when I translate from Swedish to English is that I think of how the sentence is written in Swedish. I consider the problem is that I translate the English sentence due to how I think in Swedish.

I do sometimes have a problem with tense, mode and clause elements in the English grammer. 
For writing correct sentences it is essential to know the clause elements and other important grammer. The positive point is that technical terms in business economics have been enriched in my English language.

One of my future goals is to be better in writing English. The main object is to have or take time for repetition of the English grammer and especially work with what I already mentioned having a problem with.

3 Speak

I think I have improved speaking English since I took two business economics courses in Market System and International Marketing. I followed the International Marketing course before December and I had to talk English all the time. Most of the students could not speak Swedish so English was the only language the international exchange students could speak, except their mother tongue. 

Speaking English in a proper way need knowledge about sentence structure and the right English expressions that I am about to learn. Some years ago I bought a dictionary in a bookstore that helped to translate from English to French / French to English. Ever since I have thought that I some day will know how to translate without difficulty from one of the languages to the other.

4 Listen

To understand a language other than your mother tongue is not so easy but it is easier to listen and understand than reading, writing and speaking it.

My skills in listening to British English are good but my understanding of other English speaking languages varies due to the accent. In the Market System course that I mentioned earlier, we had a man from California as our lecturer. The problem was that most of the Swedish students including me did not understand every tenth world he said because of his particular accent. 

Listening to another language also need a lot of patience. In return you can get a very nice English accent, if you listen carefully to British English.
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