!!!
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LOL for some reason I read this and was thinking “Wow a 30 year countdown! And I thought I had waited a long time between trips!”
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Hahaha ok I will be honest that I have no idea what it says! The French people are going to eat me alive.
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LOL I’m sure you’ll do fine!
Slip a little “merci” and “s’il vous plait” in there and you’ll be rocking it.
When I went to Italy I had a few phrases in mind but the only things I really committed to memory were food items my family is allergic to and the word “allergy”.
But otherwise, communication barriers are just something new to explore and laugh about afterwards.
I recall going to Paris with my parents once and at this one restaurant we had four different waiters come to our table to help us with the menu and I swear each one spoke less English than the one before him. But we made out okay.
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I have memorized Parlez-vous anglais ou allemand? My DH has been doing Rosetta stone for French so hopefully we’ll be in decent shape. I couldn’t bring myself to do it because I have been very much emotionally hedging in case the trip doesn’t happen!
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Well I can appreciate the hedging.
And I’m sure the Rosetta stone will be helpful.
Personally, I’m a train wreck with understanding spoken French.
I blame the way they slur all the words together but I suspect I’m actually antifluent in multiple languages.
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I have NO hope for spoken French. I literally cannot distinguish words either! I am very good at understanding German, much better than I have confidence to speak and pull vocabulary out of the back of my brain. I sometimes get tripped up by men with deep voices lol.
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When I was 21yo, a large group of us (ranging in age from 15-22) had an afternoon free in Montreal and somehow ended up in a nicer restaurant for an early dinner. No one in the restaurant spoke English (or at least admitted to speaking it) and not one of us spoke French except the 15yo who had just finished his first year of it in school.
Basically, he went down the menu and recognized the words, beef, chicken, & fish. He shared which items were which and we all ordered blindly! 
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Love these stories! I studied abroad in Vienna and our first night there we went to a little wine cellar type place filled with locals who just stared at us 3 girls the entire time. I actually read/spoke German but was a little rusty. I ordered what I thought was a sausage because it said “mit knobloch” (with garlic) with confidence. And the waitress didn’t ask me twice. What I got was basically fried sausage fat on toast (meant to be an appetizer for while you are drinking wine).
I am excited to find out what I will be ordering in Paris! Luckily I do think French food names are probably more recognizable than anything else.
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My mom talks about when she was in college and on a choir group trip to Europe. When they were in Paris, one of the guys - who spoke no French - looked at a menu in one of the restaurants they went to and recognized “hamburger”. Unfortunately he had no clue what Tartare was, but he figured “It’s hamburger! How bad can it be?”
He was not expecting raw hamburger.
An aside for the OP - I’d at least lead with “Bonjour! Comment allez-vous?” before you go into "Parlez-vous anglais? It looks like a little more of an effort than just asking if they speak English. If you can communicate fluently in German, I might try that. I know we have family friends who have dual US/Mexican citizenship and when they travel abroad they use their Mexican passports and at least while out speak Spanish exclusively and they have found they have much better reactions speaking Spanish than English.
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An excellent reminder. Thank you! We do generally try to speak German when we don’t want to be very obviously American but I am now afraid that my kids will give us away!
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I took French in high school and was pretty good, and I still have reasonably good reading comprehension, but I can’t understand spoken French hardly at all. So fast and slurred! And every word has like twenty homonyms thanks to their treatment of ending consonants. Lol
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