French bits and things, after 6 months

Tomorrow morning marks the beginning of the last two weeks of being an assistant. Luckily I'm not leaving right away, but it's still going to be sad! With the beginning of April, I've also been living in France (with the exception of two 1.5 week breaks to Belgium and the US) for slightly over 6 months. Woo!

Now I'm going to recount a few of my recent thoughts about French:

Why chatting on Skype, I wanted to ask Kirsty whether she was able to comfort a friend... but paused, trying to think of how to express what I meant. With a wordreference.com/enfr window open, I was racking my brain for the English word so that I could translate it into French. But instead of thinking of the word "to comfort," "soulager" popped into mind. My mind jumped to the French word before the English one! Scary but cool.

Depending on the day, my franglais has gotten pretty bad... or not really even my franglais, but my ability to communicate using language, period (full stop). One evening about a month ago when Erica and I were listening to music to try to come up with a good fill-in-the-lyrics activity (we ended up picking "Gangsta's Paradise"), and it was particularly bad. We spent a couple of hours working on the thing, and the entire time we could not formulate actual sentences. In French or in English! We still somehow managed to know exactly what the other wanted to say, but I think we only probably said about 5 proper sentences the entire evening.

I've now gotten to the point in French where, like in English, I "manges les mots" (eat my words/mumble). I'm excited that I can think fast enough in French to speak fast enough to be able to eat certain syllables, but it does mean that I need to pay attention and try to slow myself down. My accent isn't bad, but when I'm excited to say something it can get more pronounced, and when I'm already eating syllables I need to provide as much clarity as possible for les français to ensure they understand me.

An additional (re: an earlier blog post) random French grammar point that I'd forgotten, misused while in Dijon, and have now relearned: when giving commands using the informal tu subject (to people younger than you or to friends), -er verbs do not use the regular form. They leave off the 's'! With a few exceptions, of course. But for example: mange avant qu'il refroidisse, or goûte-le, c'est délicieux! use the tu form of the verb and leave off the 's'. -re and -ir verbs use the typical tu form of the verb (fais-la maintenant!), but not -er ones.

Anyone else have any random grammar points they've relearned recently?