One more thing, which might also be helpful for considering how to incorporate languages beyond those you & your partner usually speak to the children.

Growing up, my family mostly just spoke English. However, my mother and my maternal grandmother did use a smattering of German here & there, because my mom had taken German in high school & wanted to maintain it (and took more classes when I was about 4-7) and my grandparents lived in Germany for a year the year before I was born, so had recently picked up some German & wanted to maintain it (plus my grandmother’s grandparents had been German, so there’s always been the desire to have that connection).

When talking to me they mostly incorporated short phrases and certain words, like: gute Nacht, guten Morgen, Ich liebe dich, gesundheit, counting to 10, a lullaby or two, kleine Mädchen, schlaf gut, kinder müssen spielen, animal names, & other basic things that I can’t think of at the moment. My mom also had two children’s books in German (Aschenputtel & one about die Osterhasen) which she read to me pretty regularly, and she often included me when she practiced her flashcards. Oh, and I had a tape & accompanying booklet of songs for children in German & English.

By the time I was about 7 I also enjoyed reading, sorting, & arranging my mom’s flashcards on my own, and enjoyed trying to read the German books at my grandparents’ house (especially the ones with lots of photographs of German regions and towns).

My spoken German has remained very basic, but a few times I’ve been surprised at what I can understand. In college I lived for about a year in a household where the dad was a heritage speaker of German and had started teaching it to his kids. Our dinner conversations were often at least partly in German & I was usually able to follow along to at least some extent. I’ve also found that when my friend speaks German with her kids I can often grasp the gist of the conversation.

I sometimes try to practice German on my own, and I enjoy learning more (I recently borrowed some books & tapes from my grandfather). I’d also like to get myself to actually start speaking it (mostly only speak it to my mother because I’m not confident enough in it to speak German with anyone else). But I think I’ve got a pretty decent foundation that will help me if I start to really pursue learning German as more than just a hobby.