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This was a question that I considered a lot last summer in Europe.I speak fairly fluent Spanish, some French (from high school) and almost no German, Italian or Portuguese. We found that we were fine in Florence, Naples, Rome and Venice with basic greetings and what we picked up as we traveled around. Knowing Spanish definitely helped.

High school French was enough to manage most of what we needed in Provence, Cherbourg and Paris. However, I found that taxi drivers way overestimated my ability to converse and launched into lengthy discussions about local history were a little perplexed when I couldn't formulate an intelligent answer, even though I had caught the drift of what they were saying.

I had anticipated being in really good shape in Spain, but found just the opposite. Menu items were generally rather unusual, Catalan was just different enough to be a challenge, and I was chastised in Cordoba for mis-pronouncing "jerez" when I was asking for a glass of sherry. Perhaps I was overconfident! My Spanish was learned in Ecuador, with lots of practice with Cubans and Mexicans, so it is more New World Spanish than Old World Spanish, but it is generally pretty good.

Portuguese was a complete mystery to me, although I was able to figure out a lot of what I read, even if I didn't understand what I was hearing.

In Austria, we were in Salzburg and Vienna, where again a few greetings were good to know, and the numbers one and two, since there were only two of us there.

I think one of the things that I most enjoyed about the trip was the challenge of navigating around languages and finding what I really could do with the little knowledge that I had. It's definitely good to know basic greetings and a few basic concepts such as numbers.