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I have now studied English for nine years in school and am now capable of evaluating my knowledge in this interesting language. My English skills have been affected and somewhat improved by the fact that I attended the English Class in the Swedish gymnasium, and I have also taken the Cambridge Certificate in Advanced English. I will now mention some of the strengths and weaknesses I consider I have in the language.
	It took a while before I decided whether I should speak with a British or an American accent. I believe that I can speak both fairly well, although there was a period of time when I mixed the two. I finally decided on the American accent, mainly because I spoke a lot of English with my Canadian cousin during her one year long visit in Sweden. It also feels more relaxed and natural for me, than the British accent which sometimes feels a bit too formal. In my opinion I sound a bit affected when I try to speak British. Some words are slightly more tricky to pronounce in American than in British English, though, for instance the way you pronounce the "r" sounds. It is especially difficult when the "r" appears in the middle of a word, in that case it is easy to put too much emphasis on it which makes it difficult to continue saying the word in a natural way. Fortunately this problem is diminishing the more I speak.
	When it comes to reading I have become a lot better at scanning and skimming English texts during the past few years. I can find the important things I'm looking for faster, and can easier get an overview of what a text is about. I find it amusing to read passages of books out loud for myself, especially poems and paragraphs worth considering. This is also a good way of practicing my speech. Unfortunately I'm a bit lazy when I come across words I don't recognize. Instead of looking them up in a dictionary I tend to try and figure out what the word means by its context. This is not a good way if I want to improve my vocabulary, but I do try to get better and recently I have started to look most of the words up. 
	When I listen to other people speaking English I rarely have a hard time to follow. Listening to other people speaking and understanding what they are saying is usually the easiest part when you are learning a new language. I can also understand different accents of English to a rather large extent. When I do listening comprehension I can easily make significant notes while still listening, but it happens that I lose my concentration and my mind starts to wander.
	I have always found it pretty easy to write both in English and Swedish. It usually flows well as I write, although it might not always be perfectly accurate. I write the assignment or essay relatively fast, but then I like having time to read it through a number of times, preferably during a period of time stretching over a couple of days. In that way I can make corrections and maybe find alternative words in some of the sentences, which is easier to do the more times you have read it through. I seldom make large spelling errors when writing by hand, I usually see if a word is spelt correctly. The structure in my texts are not always satisfactory, but I am trying to work on that. It improved some as I took the Cambridge course, but it can always become better. I'm not totally familiar with punctuation when writing in English, it's sometimes difficult to know when to put the commas in. 
	The thing I know the least about when it comes to English is grammar. Throughout my school years I have always been among the lucky ones who usually can hear if a sentence sounds correct or not and have therefore never bothered to learn the different rules. I now regret my lack of attention in that area, and I have to put in some extra effort to learn it now instead.
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