They say that a person who speaks three languages is trilingual, a person who speaks two languages is bilingual, and a person who only speaks one language is an American.
If you don’t think this is funny, then try to order lunch in Munich.
It is a problem for those of us who travel into a world where not everyone speaks English. Here is some advice in case you go into the larger world.
The old saw is that when someone doesn’t understand you, you just turn up the volume. We have heard it. In a quiet tearoom in Edinburgh we heard an American get louder and louder asking for ranch dressing for his cucumber salad. Even then, the waiter spoke English of a sort. It made the rest of us Americans about as comfortable as Mitt Romney in a strip club.
Hint number two: don’t think you can explain things with sign language. Some simple gestures of ours may turn out to be obscene in another environment.
Counting on your fingers may work, but not in Italy. In that country the thumb is used for the number one. Give the peace sign or the victory sign and you will not get two of anything. You will get three.
Then there is inflection. The way you say a word may have different meanings. In my youth I could converse a little in Cantonese. The trouble is the nuance of that language which, by the way, has been supplanted by Mandarin. I kept asking a Chinese friend, in his language, if a young woman was very pretty and he explained to me that I had just asked him if she was cold. No wonder he didn’t answer right away.
It is essentially the same word with different emphasis.
When you walk into an Austrian store it is not helpful if you ask them, "Do you speak English?" If they don’t, you will get silence. Even if they do, they would prefer you tried to ask them in German as it shows that at least you are trying. Once you try the German, they are likely to speak to you in your native tongue.
Another consideration is not to get too good at your opening lines as they may actually think you can speak fluent French and start rattling back to you like Joe Biden on Red Bull.
There has been some discussion of something called "American Exceptionalism". This is the belief that we are different – actually better – than most others. We got here because we are special.
Try explaining this concept to a citizen of Rome, who knows where history started and where it went.
It is humbling to find yourself in a small Italian Village where people are all fluent in Italian and German, but do not have a clue about English. We somehow just expect them to know how we communicate. Their languages, however, predate anything we know.
It behooves us to realize the size of this world.
Getting louder is not the answer.
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