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This short essay will hopefully give you, as a reader, an overall impression of how I myself appreciate my general knowledge of English. I will try to give you the answer to the question: How competent do I feel about English? 
Well, a first reaction to that question is that I obviously don't feel too competent since I've chosen to attend this course in the first place, but at the same time I must feel at least a bit competent since I know that language studies at university level is very demanding and difficult which means that I probably regard myself as competent enough to cope with all that work or at least worth giving it my best shot.

The answer to the question will be presented in a kind of listing of, and discussion around, my strengths and weaknesses in each one of the four parts of English that has with reading, listening, speaking and finally writing to do.
Reading
I've spent 4.5 years at the university, which means that I've come in contact with all kinds of English course literature. My main subject has been business administration and I would guess that around 80% of the literature in that subject are in English. I'm aware that there is a very big difference between reading course literature and fiction but also between course literature in different subjects. This means that I'm probably good at reading and understanding literature with business terminology but not as good when it comes to more fiction work like novels or short stories. Although it may sound, as I'm not very confident with reading English (other than course literature) I still consider that as my strongest side, perhaps together with listening.
Listening.
The development of my listening skills has been a long story involving school, T.V., films and friends. It probably started at the same time as I begun learning English in school for about 15 years ago and has been going on since then with highschool and some courses at the university, which has been taught in English. The most recent and probably, for my listening skills, most developing part happened during my time as an exchange student last autumn. I spent one semester in the Netherlands in a town called Tilburg, which lies in the very south of the country. All the courses were in English, which was also the language I used in my spare time with friends from all over the world. This has brought with it that I, as I mentioned earlier, consider listening to be one of my stronger skills in English. 
Speaking
Speaking is a very important part but unfortunately I feel that this is not a very strong side for me. I think the problem is that I seldom get a chance to practice actually speaking English. Eventhough some courses at the university has been taught in English that doesn't mean that you practice speaking very much. Most of my speaking practice took place during my semester in Tilburg where I spent a lot of time with three British students. They would often teach me new words and expressions and correct me in a nice way at least most of the times if I pronounced some word strange.
Writing
This is the last part and probably also the least practised one of the four mentioned earlier. My experience of writing in English consists mainly of a few PM's in courses in Uppsala and a couple of larger essays in Tilburg. Nowadays I practise writing mostly when mailing and e-mailing with my English and Polish friends that I got to know during my stay in the Netherlands. As I mentioned earlier this is probably the least practised part and therefore I think also not a very strong side. This is rather difficult to decide since you seldom get response on your English when writing PM's and letters to friends which for me is the most common way of practising.

My overall impression of how competent I feel about my English is that there are sides that I feel I can manage with today, but there are also sides that definitely needs to be improved for me to feel that I'm competent enough. I believe that you can always improve your skills in all four parts but I also believe that you will come to a point where the marginal effect of more improvement is very low. I do hope to reach that point some day, hopefully soon.
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