I can’t speak French, but we spent about two weeks in France. Here are my thoughts on language.
From my experience, French people and Parisians were very nice and patient and accommodating to the fact that I couldn’t speak or read French. But the key to having a successful experience in this regard is TRYING. It seems to me that if you at least try to speak French, you try to follow basic social guidelines, people will be kind to you. What I mean is that when you walk into a store or walk into a restaurant, you should always say Bonjour or Bonsoir (good day or good evening) to everyone you see. This starts your interaction off on the right foot. Always say Merci (thank you) or Merci Beaucoup (thank you very much). Say au revoir (goodbye) or salut when leaving. Say s’il vous plaît (please). These are very basic, minimum polite things to say. But it really does ingratiate people to you - they think of you as a polite person who is putting in an effort. As soon as they realize you cannot speak French, they will usually pop right up with English and things will go smoothly. There were only a couple times that there was a difficult language interaction, so we sorta pointed and mimed our way thru.
Ordering from the menu in French was actually pretty easy. Just using context clues and knowing basic words for some food will make it easy to figure out what the dishes are.
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