It is difficult to wrap your mouth around the sounds--the nasal whispers that pronounce familiar letters in strange ways.  You are much more at home with your Spanish or Italian that pronounce every letter and are so like one another that to know one, is almost as good as knowing the other. 

But French--that is another language entirely. 

Your expectations are reasonable; you only want to be able to read a menu and ask for directions--and understand the answers.  You want to be able to say please and thank you, for you are above all a polite lady.   Yet as you study the words in your book and attempt to accurately pronounce the survival phrases your language podcast rolls out with ease, you realize that even as you know what "bonjour" should sound like, you will probably never achieve the delicate phrase reminiscent of the perfectly flaky croissant that you so hope to try.

No.  Your French will be flat and garbled, without the grace of your classroom Spanish, or the happy buoyancy of your limited Italian.  You take comfort in the fact, however, that the French will as least understand your joie de vivre even if they cannot make sense of your "parlait vous anglais?" or your "Je ne comprends pas."