Choosing your unintelligible operating language

I was watching a group of Chinese people operating a train ticket machine in Milan today, and they were struggling a little bit.  Oddly, they kept choosing Italian as the language, when there was also English, German, and a few other languages (although not Chinese).  They managed to operate it in the end*, but I wondered why they didn’t choose English as the operating language.  It’s very possible that they didn’t know much English either (and maybe they did know more Italian then English, although I think it’s unlikely).  But it brought up the question – if all of the languages are mutually unintelligible, do you just pick one at random?

I know that if English wasn’t an available option, I would probably choose Italian, Spanish, or French over, say, German, because I am slightly more familiar with them and they tend to sound a bit more like English.  But if the machine gave me scripts I couldn’t read (say, Russian, Thai, Japanese), what would I do?

The Chinese tourists had the destination stored on their mobile phone, which was a good idea.  It’s always good to have something to compare the options with.  If I was going somewhere without a Romanised script, I’d probably copy and paste to my phone or iPod too.

Have you been in a situation like this?  What did you do?

*The machine wasn’t that difficult to work out, but the delay made me miss my train!  Luckily there was another train an hour later, and I could use the extra time to write this blog post.