There's a difference between visiting somewhere and living there, though.

When you visit somewhere, you're interesting in communicating, and you're dealing more with people involved in tourism.

When you live somewhere, you want to be able to converse as well as communicate, and are dealing with people in a much larger variety of capacities.

I've visited Barcelona and Warsaw several times, speak neither Catalan nor Polish, and have not had a single communication problem.

(I've also visited several remote parts of countries with obscure languages and alphabets where English isn't spoken. You can always communicate without a common language, it just takes more patience.)