In all my travels I have never been able to learn much of the language. This is always to my shame because I feel like an ignorant American who assumes everyone will know English. Even though, in my experience, this has always been true, I still feel bad about it.
I do always try to learn a few phrases of the native language, but I am usually so afraid of messing up that I resort to one or two word comments to get by.
The most important of these is "Thank you."
Below are the languages I can now fluently say thank you in. However, keep in mind, there are many ways to say thank you (formal/informal) and so you can still mess this up.
Czech - Děkuji [Dye-koo-yi]
Polish - Dziękuję [Jen-KOO-yeh]
Hungarian - Köszönöm [KER-ser-nerm]
German - Danke schön [DAHNK-uh shoon]
Spanish - Gracias
Greek - Ευχαριστώ [Efharisto]
Turkish - teşekkür ederim [teh-SHEH-keur eh-deh-rim]
Japanese - ありがとうございます [ari-gato go-zai-mas]
After thank you, the next most important thing to know is "excuse me" or "sorry" because you will find yourself saying sorry in English whenever you bump into someone or want to get someone's attention. For the Western world "pardon" works well pronounced with a French accent, but it didn't help me much in Japan.
You should add french to the list, because Merci is pretty easy.
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