I think quite a lot of this is I learned over the past year through sheer trial and error, and I'm extraordinarily grateful for the learning. I'm cracking a smile at some of these because I did learn the hard way and am still working on many of these things. (Merci beaucoup a vous, vous savez. Tu ecris meilleur que tu as ecrit, aussi, quand le jeu a commence.)

As for the vocabulary thing - aside from what I'm learning now, which I daren't use in NO for the sake of being understood - I can recommend opening up a thesaurus site from google and typing in "talk" if one is ever stuck. I know I've been stuck for that many times myself.