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I know some basics in French, Italian and Spanish, just enough to be able to get a hotel room, order some tee, ask where a certain street or place is and how the weather will be tomorrow. My experience is that people are far more willing to help you if you try to ask your question in their language.
We have lots of tourists in Munich in Sept/ Oct (guess why!), the city is owned by them, actually. The funny thing is that they adjust perfectly as far as the typical Oktoberfest-look is concerned. Hordes of tourists enter shopping malls and buy Dirndl (traditional Bavarian costumes) and Lederhosen (Bavarian leather trousers), they even buy hats, traditional Bavarian socks, shoes etc. When they come out of the stores, they look more Bavarian than any native! But noone cares about speaking German. So it happens quite often that a group of "Bavarians" would stop you on the street and ask in English "Hi, where's the next subway station". The Japanese seem to be an exception. Last year some Japanese people (city maps in hands, apparently lost, but certainly on their way to the Oktoberfest), asked me if I could show them in their map where they were right now. They asked "Wosamma" which is Bavarian slang for German "Wo sind wie hier" ("Where are we").....
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