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<title> EVALUATION </title>
I will in this essay try to assess my knowledge in the English language in the fields of listening, reading, speaking and writing. I will try to evaluate what I consider beeing my strong and weak sides in these areas.
Listening to English:
I have, ever since I was a kid, been very interested in rockmusic and not only listening to the actual music, but also trying to listen to and understand the meaning of the lyrics. Since almost all contemporary rockmusic is sung in the English language I'm quite used to hearing it and can easily understand it. I have also many times tried to learn lyrics that I find especially good or interesting by listening to the song in head phones and trying to figure out the words, sometimes rewinding the tape over and over again at a particularly difficult word or phrase, and write it down on paper. I also very much enjoy watching films and have, also since I was a kid, more or less been forced to watch English-spoken films with no subtitles simply because they have not been relaesed in Sweden and there was no subtitles avilable. To sum things up; I'm used to listen to English being spoken, or sung, and I have acctually no problems with it, if there is a word I don't understand I can more or less figure it out by the context.

Reading in English: 
Well, it's basically the same deal here... Due to my huge interest in music I started very early to read various British and American music periodicals dealing with heavy metal and punk music, basically because back then (the mid-eighties) there was no such magazines available in Swedish. If you wanted to learn more about your favorite bands you had to try and spell your way through English-written litterature. I can say now in retrospective that it was very useful to stumble through these magazines since I now can read English pretty fluent. The only bad thing about that is that I sometimes becomes a little over-confident in my skill of mastering the vocabulary. I seldom take the time to actually look up a in a dictionary a word I may not grasp. 

Speaking English:
I'm afraid I'm not as good at speaking English as I am at reading and understand/listen to it. I don't speak that much English in my every-day situation, sometimes I have to answer a phone-interwiev for my bands, talking to people at our record companies (based in France and Germany) and so on. I don't feel uncomfortable speaking English with another person that has English as a second language since I, in my humble opinion, speak more than well enough to make myself understood, but when I speak to a "native" I somehow feel uneasy, I get a feeling of "inferiority", so to speak. I do sometimes have a problem with finding the proper words or terms right away and I'm also a bit uncertain with word order in sentences and this becomes more evident when I'm speaking with someone that has English as their mother tounge.

Writing in English:
This part is what I feel is the most difficult. When I'm writing a longer piece in English, like this essay, it is with difficulties. As I mentioned earlier I sometimes have problems with using the correct words so the use of a dictionary is more or less a must. Also my problems with word order, correct grammar, punctuation, and most of all, spelling becomes almost embarrassingly evident. I write all the lyrics for my band "The Unkinds" in English and I think it's very fun to write in English for a change, it's a very useful and suitable language for rock lyrics with all the "cool" words. I have gotten a lot of aclaim for my lyrics in various underground music magazines from all around Europe but I think they would have been less favourable if our American bassplayer hadn't went over them before recording and corrected my spelling mistakes and grammatical errors. Hopefully I can improve my writing skills by writing essays like this one.

I think this is just about everything I can tell about my competence in these fields. Some things I feel I master pretty well, other things I'm not so certain of and they need some more practice. It's been quite interesting to evaluate these topics and I have tried to be as honest to myself as I possibly could when writing this.
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