Can I get by with just English in Morocco?

Short answer: yes — plenty of travellers come to Morocco with only English and have a wonderful, smooth trip. Tourism is a huge part of the economy, and in the places visitors spend most of their time — riads, hotels, restaurants, tour offices, the big monuments and museums — you'll reliably find good English. Many guides speak it fluently, and younger Moroccans, raised on the internet, often speak it better than the French their parents learned.

Where English thins out is off the tourist track: a small village in the Atlas, a local-only eatery, an older taxi driver, a rural bus station. There, French or Darija helps a lot, and pointing, gesturing and goodwill carry you the rest of the way. Moroccans are remarkably patient and resourceful with language barriers — I've watched entire transactions completed through smiles, a calculator and three shared words. You're rarely truly stuck.

The modern safety net is your phone. A translation app (Google Translate works offline if you download Arabic and French first) bridges almost any gap — type or speak your sentence and show the screen. Saving your riad's address in Arabic script to show a taxi driver is a classic, genuinely useful trick. Between English in the tourist sphere, an app for the tricky moments, and a calculator for prices, you've got every situation covered.

My honest encouragement: don't let language worry hold you back for a second. English alone is enough to travel Morocco well. That said, the difference between 'getting by' and 'connecting' is just five Darija words — salam, shukran, la shukran, afak, bslama. Learn those, lean on English the rest of the time, and you'll find the country opens up warmly. The effort is small; the welcome it earns is enormous.