I work in a museum, and a lot of German, French, and Italian-speaking tourists come in. [I live in America, by the way.] I speak Spanish and an okay level of French, but I'm not so good on the Italian and German. I can read/write Italian fairly well, but I, for some unknown reason, have issues pronouncing Italian. I really don't know any German at all. What I'm wondering is, does anyone know if it would be beneficial to learn tourist-type Italian/German so that I could talk to some of these tourists in their native language? Would they appreciate it? I mean, I've been meaning to learn German and Italian pronunciation anyways. But would it be worth it to try to learn some tourism-related stuff?
And slightly off-topic, but there was a French couple that came in a few weeks ago who seemed really surprised that I was American and spoke French [and Spanish; I accidentally slipped something in Spanish in there *whoops*]. Has anyone else ever run in to this? I know that the stereotype about Americans is that they only speak English [you know, that "What do you call someone who speaks three langauges? [Trilingual] Two? [Bilingual] One? [American]" joke], but has anyone else had a similar experience?