[zwieback]

This is great, hopefully OP can keep it up. I spoke only my native German to our first daughter and it went great but when the second one came around she wanted to have nothing to do with it. "Stop speaking Spanish!" was her reply (all foreign languages were spanish in her estimation) so I slacked off.

Even with my older one I stopped the German when she was a bit older because I didn't want to be the only one having simplistic conversations and I also prefer speaking English myself.

In retrospect I regret my laziness. Some of my German drinking buddies, even the ones with American wives, kept it up and I feel a bit guilty.

Lessons I've learned:

- It's a lot easier when a stay-home parent speaks the foreign language

- Speaking a "useful" foreign language (Spanish, Mandarin) might be easier, especially if there are immersion programs in your town

- Success varies with each child

[herewulf]

I advise you not to give up. It's never too late to learn a language (further).

I have two elementary aged kids who are German/English bilingual and have always lived in an English speaking country.

What has worked for us:

- I always speak to them in German -- I'm not the stay at home parent so every word counts

- Media in German (their favorite shows of their choosing -- it's too easy with Netflix and YouTube these days and they watch almost nothing in English)

- Playtime related to these shows' themes is usually in German because the kids assume the characters only speak German

- We participated in a bilingual German playgroup composed of around 10 families in a metro area of one million people -- larger areas no doubt have even better opportunities

- We believe any additional language is useful for opening up a child's mind and making foreign language learning easier in the future

My kids seem to have a good attitude towards being bilingual but maybe that will change as they age. I hope they will find it to be an invaluable gift when they are grown. It certainly is fun to share something special and unique with them.

[zwieback]

That's great, keep it up. Mine took German through high school and the oder one got a minor in German in college. The younger is still not that interested in German but they both have both citizenships, hopefully will take advantage later on.

[macNchz]

Growing up, my dad didn't speak his native French with me. I did, however, pick up enough from hearing him on the phone every day and visiting Switzerland for a few weeks each year that I could loosely understand it. When I got to high school and started taking French classes it came to me extremely easily. In college I spent a semester in France and after a few weeks felt comfortably fluent, and was told I didn't have a discernible American accent. So ultimately if your kids want to pick it back up they may find it fairly easy in the future.

[sneed_chucker]

It's really hard to maintain German in the states, because unless you're in certain parts of rural Pennsylvania, no one else speaks it and it's not really useful for jobs.

But I'm grateful that my parents passed it onto me.

Acquiring that core of the language at an early age is really valuable. Throughout my teens my German was a lot weaker, but once I decided I wanted to get better it was really easy to train myself up by listening to news and podcasts, and setting up regular conversations with native speakers.

Your kids' experiences may turn out to be similar.

[makeitdouble]

I think getting the kid to get familiar with the sounds as early as possible is the critical point.

If they reach a point they recognize all the sounds and properly vocalize, I think we can give them a break and speak what they want. It will never be too late to get deeper into the language and learn to properly speak on their own terms, when they're morivated to do it.

In particular I think it's frustrating both for the kid an the parent to speak a language that look like a dead end, when there is nothing to read/watch in it that the kid enjoys, or friends of their age speaking it too.

[KMag]

Based on my family's history, my guess is that success rates are generally higher for the first kids.

My mom's side of the family is from East Friesland. My maternal grandfather was born in the US, but didn't speak any English when he started school. Grandpa was certainly fluent in English by the time I came along, and I presume he was reasonably fluent in English by the end of grade school. My maternal grandparents were bilingual, but decided to speak "Pig German" at home and let their kids learn English in school. My mom's oldest brother learned English the same way Grandpa did. Mom's older siblings spoke English enough that Mom never really learned to speak German. Grandma and Grandpa would speak to Mom in German, and she'd reply in English.

Though, plenty of German vocabulary made it into Mom's lexicon. I think I was in late middle school or early high school when I realized wunderbar wasn't an English word.

My oldest son is more fluent in Thai than English, where my wife does a good job of speaking almost 100% Thai to the kids. We'll see how the twins do once they start speaking and when the oldest starts going to preschool. My guess is that the oldest will speak primarily English to the twins, making it harder for them to pick up Thai.

[mc32]

One interesting thing is if only one parent speaks the second language then kids will tend to only (obviously) pick up the tendencies of that speaker.

So if a dad then the kid, irrespective of their gender, will pick up dad’s masculine tendencies or if mom her feminine tendencies. (dad may say the equiv of "dude" and mom may say the equiv of "guys", those sorts of things.)

It’s not good or bad. It just is.

[zwieback]

Yeah, it's very context sensitive. My father in law learned Hungarian as his first language in a Hungarian neighborhood in Cleveland. When he went to Hungary decades later they told him he spoke like their great grandparents.