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<title> MY ADVENTURES IN THE WORLD OF ENGLISH </title>
On the following pages you will find as much a presentation of myself as of my skills in the four areas of listening to, reading, speaking and writing in English. You will find that my fascination of American (pop)culture probably is what got me into this English course and hopefully will get me through it. My interest in he English language is in fact secondary to my interest in America as a cultural phenomenon and thus these four skills is not means within themselves for me but rather just tools to better grasp different aspects of mainly American society and culture.

I owe a great part of my listening skills in English to the medium of television. At the same time as I reached the age of thirteen my family became the proud owners of cable-TV, and the increased influx of English and American TV shows and channels threw me into the wonderful world of daytime soaps, talkshows and sitcoms. Sure, earlier we'd had excellent shows like Cosby, and less excellent ones like Dallas, but MTV, NBC and the Swedish commercial channels brought us a whole new spectrum of pop-cultural "trash" entertainment. What more could a teenage boy ask for? 
	Especially channels like MTV and NBC gave me several hours of involountary studying of the English language, and I believe it's mostly through watching these channels with their rapid English that my generation has aquired the overall good understanding of spoken English. 
	Also through MTV I got more and more interested in music, which in turn further infused me with the more lyrical and poetic uses of English that you couldn't obtain through watching sitcoms.

Reading has always been easy for me. As soon as I learned to read I started working my way through all the classics like Jules Verne and those other guys. I kept on plowing through novels until we got cable, which for a couple of years had a tendency to overshadow most other leisure activities. However, my interest in reading later resurfaced, allthough I did most of my reading in Swedish. 
	During my final year at "gymnasiet" I started to get more interested in looking up books in English as I was getting convinced that reading a book in it's original language would put you, as the reader, one step closer to the writers own intentions instead of having to rely on a translators personal impressions of the text. This conviction only grew stronger when I arrived at Uppsala University where I discovered that 99% of the reading material was in English. I would say that being a student here for three years certainly improved my English reading skills and it has also led me to develop a definite preference for English and American litterature in their original languages. 
	My sparetime reading is mostly concentrated on books on African American music, history and socio-cultural issues, as well as crime or horror novels. Just as a prefer American TV and music to that of the British, I'd rather read a novel by Elmore Leonard, Walter Mosley or Stephen King than a classic by Dickens (in my opinion I read enough of those books as a kid). 

As far as actually speaking English I haven't had that much experience, although I believe that I could, with a bit of practice, manage it pretty fluently. The few times that I've actually spoken English outside of school (which up tp this point in time hasn't exactly been frequently) has probably been at the pub, or at some other event in an even worse state of alcohol infused overconfidence. As I'm sure you can imagine, what I at the time thought was a pretty good example of spoken English, in fact didn't even come close to understandable language in the ears of the poor Englishmen and Americans that I tried to talk to. 
	Although I haven't spoken English that much I have no less discovered something pretty interesting regarding my own inner converations with myself, commonly reffered to as though processes. All the watching of English and American television, listening to music and reading books in English apparently has kicked my brain into an semi-English mode. For the last year or so I've more and more frequently found myself walking around thinking in English terms. This recently found (well I guess you could call it ability) has, I believe, also somewhat improved my spoken English (even if I haven't had that many opportunities to test it yet).

So, finally we arrive at describing my skills in the very task I'm currently occupied with, namely writing. Since this is the first time I've actually written something in English since "gymnasiet" I don't really know how readible or enjoyable it really is for you, the reader, but from my perspective it's going better than what I had expected. 
	Since my experience of writing in English is very limited I thought that I'd mention some things about my writimg in general. I believe that I've always been a fairly good writer and I'm convinced that studiying at university level with all its essays and papers is progressively improving my writing skills. I do however have a lot of problems, among other things I often tend to produce sentences that seem to just go on and on without any punctuation in sight. 
	Another problem, one that you're propably discovering at this point, is my inability to keep within the recommended length of, for example, an essay. I always end up like this, trying to finish the last part of quickly, well aware that I've already written too much (a lot of it probably nonsense). I know that at this point you're supposed to go back and revise, extract and that kind of stuff, but there's something about destroying something that you've thought of, formed and written that I just don't like. I find that it reflects the state of our society where free thoughts never can be free but has to be molded and cut in order to fit into somekind of system, even if this very system's structure may not be one with which you can relate...Well you see there I go again, rambling away down some irrelevant track of thought.
	But in my defense I have to point out that this was meant to be an exercise in writing and revising, so i humbly accept yor judgement, what ever it might be.
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