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<title> English </title>
In this essay I will try to assess my abilities when it comes to writing and speaking the English language. I'm going to tell you about my first encounters with English, and then come all the way up to this day. I'll talk about how my approach to studying and speaking English has varied and changed through the years. Finally I will try to point out the things I am good at and those I am less good at. 
I was not exposed to English until I was about 11 years old, at least I wasn't aware of it until then. English was introduced in school as a subject in 4th grade, for me a whole new experience. We started by learning some very basic words like: finger, hand, nose and head for example. In 4th I think we just practiced these basic words the whole year. Then in 5th and 6th grade it got a little more advanced, but still the sentences were never more complicated than "I have a big nose". These years I studied just like all the other pupils, but I paid little attention to what we were doing - it did not interest me particularly. In Secondary school I started to focus more on the studies. Slowly I became one of the best students in the English class, according to the results on the tests that is. In 8th and 9th grade they gave us grades and I obtained high ones in English. I scored high points on the exams and I was getting to understand the grammar and learning lots of words. The problem though was that I somehow neglected the speaking of English. The reason was that I, at this age, had periods when I stuttered frequently, and this scared me off. I hated to speak in the classroom. 
In high school I did my homework in English carefully, and the language got even more interesting. During my 2nd year of high school I found out that I wanted to study abroad, so at the end of the summer I went to Colorado in the U.S., to live there for 10 months and go to high school as an exchange student. There I stayed in an American host family. Living in an English-speaking environment was exactly what I needed to improve my speech. The only way of making myself understood was to speak their language; the only language they knew. I immediately made friends who I hung out with, speaking English almost every waking hour. In relation to this I can say that now I'm better at speaking the English language than writing it, although I might not always speak perfectly accurate in terms of grammar. This is of course due to having spoken English a lot, both with my host parents and in high school. My English is similar to the one spoken in Colorado, for better or worse. 
It is often difficult to say whether you're good at something or not. 
Compared to what and to whom?
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