Don't worry about it too much. We have been travelling for years and lived in China for two years and have enough trouble with English at times let alone any other language.
Cheat sheets prepared with google translate are good, but now you can carry a smart phone with dozens of languages off-line and that helps a lot. Yes, always possible to get into sticky situations with repairs and such, but acting skills go a long way.
Just remember the golden rule - if they can't understand you the first time, just speak louder and louder until they can.
Tip - many more people can read and write English than are willing to try speaking it (about half a billion in China just for starters) so try writing things down is talking seems not to work.
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