Question about teaching multiple spoken languages

[Mama Lynx]

How do you incorporate spoken foreign language into your daily lives (or do you)? If you study more than one language, do you choose one to bring into your daily routine for better conversation ability, or do you do this with all the languages you study?

[pixelroper]

we have only done this w/Spanish, not sure why, I randomly just start a simple conversation and expect to be answered in Span. For Latin & Greek; the basic class time lines. With random requests for memorization work. By *random* I mean- we could be; in the car, folding clothes, cooking or out shopping. (Not sure why I feel the need to explain *random*??)

[Lorna]

We study French, Danish and Latin.
The French is, perhaps, a more serious study and we sometimes play games just speaking in French and of course study it every day.
We are actually in Denmark and so we do speak it occasionally with others. We are simply learning Danish for fun and to expand our horizons. We actually speak with others in Danish casually and throughout the day, to one another, in a silly way. For example we might say 'Thanks for the meal' and 'I have a sore tummy'. All the simple things such as 'thank you' and 'see you later'. It is a fun language to speak because it sounds so different from English.
With Latin, we are more likely to discuss this if we come across a word with Latin roots such as the name of a plant etc.

[Pongo]

Latin, Spanish and Sign Language. I was raised in a bi-lingual home Spanish/English plus my older sister is deaf so I learned sign language too! I find Latin very easy to teach because of my roots in Spanish. I teach the kids songs using Sign Language and I speak to them in Spanish a lot. They study Latin separately and every night someone takes a turn saying a Latin prayer. It works well!

[Mama Lynx]

My problem is ... most likely that I'm overthinking things.

I want to introduce more Spanish conversation into our days. However, we are not formally studying Spanish, and we are formally studying Latin. I find that when I go to introduce Spanish phrases, my urge is to do them in Latin instead, so that we learn Latin better. But that doesn't get us anywhere with the Spanish.

I must be overthinking this, right? Surely if I introduce some Latin conversation here, and some Spanish there, it will all be to the good? Or will it?

[Lorna]

If your children know the difference then that sounds great. You might, however, be best studying Spanish formally so that they recognise the words and phrases from their studies. There is a great deal of cross-over with Latin and Spanish and switching from one to the other might help comprehension but also may be confusing the other direction, English to Spanish.
I studied Italian at school after years of Latin and found myself able to translate from Italian to English with relative ease but the other way I was pretty lost.
Keeping the contexts where you use each language separate is probably the key issue here.

[Rosie_0801]

I would probably be better to designate a time for each language, such as mealtimes, mornings, etc. When you have enough of each language, you could specify days of the week for each language. Random mixing and matching makes it all more work, before everyone can formulate the answer to your question, they have to figure out which language it is. Around here we're bilingual in English and Australian Sign Language (Auslan.) The language we use usually depends on the level of background noise. Oh, and if we want to have private conversations without eavesdroppers ;) Later we will be able to slot in Latin whenever the mood takes us, as it's very clearly not English or Auslan. What you can do sort of depends how easily everyone changes language gears. I can switch from English to Auslan without problems, my hubby needs a few moments to make the switch.
Rosie