<p>I’m planning to go to McGill next year, and I visited earlier this year. I loved Montreal, but I never knew what to say when someone addressed poor monolingual me in French. So what is the politest way to ask for someone to repeat themselves in English? (“Je ne parle pas fran?ais”, “en anglais, s’il vous pla?t”, “Parlez-vous anglais?”, “I’m sorry”, “Do you speak English?”, “Ummm…<em>befuddled look</em>” etc.) I want to learn conversational French while I’m at McGill, but I don’t want to unwittingly tell some Montrealer to “speak white!” before I can reach a level of comprehension.</p>