On the flip side, I wonder how many American in other countries bother to try to learn the native language... certainly on the Amazing Race, they seem to expect to always speak English and a lot of contestants "blame" the natives when they can't understand them...
Well, I do think there's definitely something to this and that Americans seem more averse to learning multiple languages than people on average. However, on my trip I stayed in hostels in two German-speaking countries (and one English speaking country). There were always people from around the world and English was basically the Lingua Franca for hostels. I only know a little German, but excluding the people who spoke it as a native language (mainly Germans who were visiting Austria or a different region of Germany than where they were from or making their way across multiple countries), I only found a couple of travelers who had even my paltry grasp of the language. And more of these people were Australian or British than were American. Also, there were people from Korea or Japan who had already spent some time learning English but weren't particularly great with it and couldn't learn German on top of that. I mean, if some Korean kid who speaks three languages when I can't even really speak two wants to travel in Europe, I'm not going to bother him about not knowing German. I might bother him about majoring in business, though.
I think in Germany, aside from a lot of the populace speaking some English, there's a lot of willingness to try to work around language barriers. It's not universal and I actually did run into a big problem in one completely ridiculous case. But yeah, just throwing that out there.
After all, there is no law (except in certain states, in which case [I believe] the official languages are both English and Spanish) that states that English is required for communication here in the US. Although I certainly wish there was such a law. I'm a big proponent of English as an official language, but I think the window of opportunity for such legislation closed years ago. Proposing it now would be political suicide for too many politicians.
I'm not sure what you mean, exactly. What would a law entail? Presumably you're not saying that if my sister says something to me in French that I can report her and have her fined. Hilarious as that would be, I definitely don't think it would be a good idea...