Grandparents spoke it. Did not seem to involve me so I did not feel need to break the code. Picked up some over years but never felt the need and I have an uncanny ability to speak in code in my native tongue.

"Not in front of the kinda..."

My grandparents spoke kiddush 99 percent of the time around me and my parents often spoke it at home. Everyone in my generation learned to understand it for just the same reason you did. Understand it, not speak it. After my grandparents died hearing people speaking Yiddish was always very comforting to me. Unfortunately I don't hear it very often anymore and I'm sorry for my children that it is not something they will ever know.

I love it. I have picked up a number of Yiddish words over the years, from friends and clients. Some words, like fakakta, just don't have an appropriate (amidst company) translation! Victoria sometimes kids me that I know more Yiddish than her.

German Yiddish and Hebrew however my mother figure it out early that I learned to speak those languages as they spoke.

My mother and grandmother spoke some Yiddish, so I picked up a bit. And when my parents wanted to speak without my brother and me understanding what they were saying, they'd speak French. So, naturally, I took junior high school and high school French (instead of Spanish, like most of the kids), and deprived our parents of that particular secret code language....

My grandparents spoke it. My parents didn't really - except for key words and phrases. Paul is definitely more fluent-by-proximity. Lol. My fave story is when he walked into a super bowl party one year at our friends the Katz's where the giants were down, looked around and said: "what's with all the farbissiner punnem?!"

A word here and there in our house, but I am reasonably convinced that a good portion was just plain made up.

I grew up in Yiddish - unfortunately, there are very few Yiddish speakers left...

My father was from Vienna & my mother fr/ Zurich; they spoke to each other in German when presumably little ears weren't wanted, and we tuned them right out. They also learned French and English in school growing up. Too bad, we could so easily have been trilingual but they only spoke English to us.
My father got more fluent after moving here & in the army (where phrases like Heavens to Betsy boggled & amused him); my mother came a little later and also got fluent.
Over dinner a few yrs ago w/ a lovely couple they knew here early on, my mom said she knew English when she got here. The wife replied, well you may have been speaking English, but we had no idea what you were saying!
Their accents were a lot stronger when I was little, and softened a lot over the years.
Memories ~