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<title> HOW I PERCEIVE MY RELATIONSHIP TO THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE </title>
My interest in English awoke genuinely in my late teens when I had finished upper secondary school and went backpacking with a friend of mine. We visited London for a few days and I got completely taken with this multicultural city. In autumn I returned to study English. All my life I have been an inveterate reader of trashy novels but over the years and since I spent time in London and got hooked on this language my literary taste has improved. This is my starting point to my assessment of how far I have reached when it comes to speaking and writing English.

	 Thus, for the last ten years I have been and still am an avid reader of novels in English. My philosophy has been that as I enjoy reading I might as well read literature in English and accordingly kill two birds with one stone. For a long time I read books very methodically, looking up every single word or phrase I didn't know. I wrote down the corresponding Swedish word and the explanation of it in English, using my much beloved dictionary "Collins Cobuild English Language Dictionary" (which I now regretfully must replace for "Longman"). Consequently I have developed a large vocabulary and knowledge of idiomatic expressions as well as phrasal verbs.

	 I am a very hard critic of myself. I never was much confident in my English skills when I went to school, but when I enrolled in and started studying at "The Hampstead School Of English" in London the teachers goaded me on and their interest in me and my studies acted as an incentive to me. Today I have a good practical knowledge of spoken and written English but I haven't satisfactorily internalised the language in my own speaking. There are two reasons for this: me being shy and self-critical. I think too much before I speak. I make up the sentence in my head before I pronounce it. I become hesitant whether one can use a word a certain way or if what I prepare to say is grammatically correct. So I often keep my mouth shut and consequently haven't developed a fluency in speaking. I haven't made all those words I love "mine", at least not when it comes to oral expression.

	 As I mentioned above I feel insecure about grammar. What with having neglected this area I can't explain why I express myself one way or the other. I do believe though that somehow I express myself grammatically rather correctly when I do open my mouth..

	 To conclude, suffice it to say that I lack in grammatical knowledge but I also have much hidden knowledge which I look forward to activating during this course.
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