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I think I am rather good at English, especially grammar and spelling. Perhaps I'm not so good at talking English. I think talking is the most difficult of the four skills: reading, writing, listening and talking.
	 Reading I think is the easiest thing to do, mostly because then there is time to look up words and phrases I don't understand. Most of the times when I read something I don't understand I try to figure it out by looking at the context or at least try to get an idea about the meaning of it. If it is a keyword in the text I usually look it up in a dictionary. There is time to do that when I'm reading. Usually I try not to use the dictionary because it creates a distance to the text and I don't like that. So if I can't figure out the meaning of the word, and the word doesn't seem to be important for the understanding of the text, I just skip it and keep on reading, but if the same word appears over and over again I'll look it up. Sometimes when I don't understand a sentence it's because I've thought a noun was a verb and then the real verb doesn't fit in or the sentence sounds absurd. But after having reread the sentence I can see where I misunderstood. 
	 Writing is quite easy, too. Like when I'm reading I have time to use a dictionary. My experience from past writing is that I usually don't make so many spelling mistakes. Most mistakes I make have to do with the syntax. I often place words in the wrong order. Especially the adverbs, I don't know where to put them in the sentence. I either think they fit in nearly everywhere or nowhere in the sentence. Another thing I have some trouble with is the register. Sometimes it's difficult to find the proper word to use. 
	 The third of these skills, listening, I don't think I have any problem with either. I don't always understand every word or, to be honest, rather often I don't understand every word, but I don't think of that as a problem. I don't have to understand every little word to understand what someone is saying to me. This goes as long as the one who is talking to me isn't talking too fast or using a dialect. It's easy to understand British and American English. Australian English isn't that difficult, but Irish and Scottish English are very troublesome for me.
	 Talking is the most difficult of these four skills, because it has to be fluent and accurate at the same time. My biggest problem is the fluency. I can talk to myself quietly inside my head and everything runs smoothly but when I try to say it aloud I stumble and loose endings and so on, but I guess it is because of nervousness and that I'll get better at it if I practise it a lot. Pronounciation of some words can be difficult, but I often avoid using words I can't pronounce. I know that I'll never learn how to pronounce them if I don't give it a try, but I still keep avoiding them. Sometimes I can't find the correct word for what I want to say, but most of the time I can go around it or explain what I mean using body language or words that mean nearly the same. And as I've written earlier I have problem with the register. It goes for both writing and talking. Many of these weaknesses I think have to do with my small vocabulary. I understand a lot of words but they belong to my passive vocabulary, they aren't in the vocabulary I use when I am talking. 
	 The things I need to work on are the syntax and my vocabulary. I need to learn to use more words and I need to learn when to use them. And last but not least I need to practise all four skills, especially talking.
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