assuming they even understand us...
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...Sorry, couldn't resist :P

... but frankly, we're ruled by governments that are so terrified of EACH OTHER that chaces are, they'll be throwing nuclear missles at you the moment they get jumpy. Sorry. But the rest of us are usually pretty good!"

(Usually I'm more optimistic, too, but last night I watched "The Day The Earth Stood Still" and wound up being rather cynical.)

... where they don't speak English?

Popular sci-fi ideas for what to 'say' to aliens if we meet them include exchange of mathematical and chemistry/physics concepts, because those are seen as being more universal than language.

However the fact that we'll have to come up with some kind of pidgin way of translating this tends to put a dampener on it.

I'd suggest pictures, but then who knows what kind of vision system they'll have, if any. They might not see with the same light spectrum as us, for a start.

What if they see in UV? Or infra-red? Or microwaves, for heaven's sake?

Hell, IF there are aliens and IF they contact us, I'l be mightily surprised if they even breathe oxygen. And if they can break our atmosphere in their oogly boogly spaceships, I'll eat my steel-capped boots :D

That said, where's my tinfoil hat? :P

"Hi! My name's (name here)! What's your name? Let's be friends! Can I hug you?"

"Hello. We are from a faraway place. We would like to cooperate with you to form a better life for both of our species. However, we must warn you that if you should in any way attempt to harm us, we have access to weapons that could very easily shatter your homeworld. We would say you'd all just become ash, but the fact is it'd be more likely for those who took the brunt of the blasts to be vaporized. The few of you who survive will likely succumb to the fallout and die shortly."

It occurs to me that I'm a somewhat aggressive individual. Oh well, never hurts to be safe when potentially hostile extraterrestrial beings are involved.

Which is unlikely, unless they're far more advanced than we and have universal translators. But, assuming...

How about just saying "hello"?

If I weren't about ninety per cent asleep, I'd have a lengthy answer for this. But my brain is unconscious, so I'll limit myself to saying the odds of them understanding anything we say aren't all that high. And I'll let Trojie explain exactly why.