I started (1) learning English when I was 14 years old after five years of studying Russian. In the (2) beginning I encountered some difficulties learning the language, but I tried my (3) best to overcome them. Firstly, my English pronunciation was (4) affected by the way I spoke Russian. To solve this problem, I practised by listening to tapes in English every day. I played the tape, stopped after each sentence, and (5) repeated the sentence several times. At school, I joined an English speaking club (6) which was organised by a teacher from Britain. She understood my difficulty and helped me very much in improving my pronunciation. Secondly, I found it really hard to learn English vocabulary. In Russian, the way you write the word is the way you pronounce it. However, English spelling is often (7) different from its pronunciation. To get over this difficulty I started using the dictionary. Whenever I learnt a new word, I looked it (8) up carefully in the dictionary. Then I tried to remember the way to read and write the word. After that, I wrote the word down several (9) times in a notebook. Gradually, I got (10) used to the spelling system of the language. Now I’m confident that my English has become much better.