Getting understood

Stella told me last night that she was rather amused by my worries over whether I'd be understood in Graubünden.

She pointed out, quite rightly, that most tourists don't tend to speak with the "locals" an awful lot, and what interactions they do have tend to be rather limited: "Where is the train station, please?", "How much does this cost?", "I'd like a cheeseburger and fries, please.". In which case your chances for being understood are already fairly high simply because there are a limited number of things you'd be expected to say.

And tourists typically don't stop random people on the street and ask them whether they can practice their $LOCAL_LANGUAGE on them.

Ah well. We shall see how much I shall end up speaking (or hearing) :)