I haven't been in Beijing in years and I've never ridden the metro there. However, my experiences with their transit systems in China is that you'll find names written in Pinyin--their words, our alphabet. This works fine for names as they mostly wouldn't be meaningful words anyway.

Rule #1 for navigating in China--have your destination and any important waypoints (such as the station you want to get off the Metro at) in writing. Do not expect to be understood if you say them.

Restaurants are going to be a problem unless you go to fancy places. I have rarely seen English on a menu although pictures of dishes aren't exactly rare. I have seen a *FEW* restaurants that do the Japanese thing of a whole display of fake dishes. This is a big help but even then it can sometimes be hard to tell what a dish is.

I have never had problems with them trying to charge me too much when there are posted prices, although she has caught errors on the bill several times. When prices aren't posted negotiation is expected and you're going to be overcharged, period. In the cities tourists frequent my wife doesn't want me anywhere around when she's negotiating as she's China-born and can still pretend to be Chinese. When we got far off the tourist track once that didn't apply, though--it was like I was invisible rather than the usual thing of being the target of every merchant around no matter how bad their English. (We will be walking along either holding hands or with my hand on her shoulder and they'll keep trying to interest me despite being barely able to communicate what they are selling. The more persistent ones will keep it up even when she tells them we aren't interested.)