Linguistic Real Estate

or, the logistics of learning two languages at once.

So this is my metaphor for learning a language.

You start with a handful of words and a smattering of grammar, and you build yourself a little mud hut that may or may not survive an unexpected sneeze, let alone the winter. But slowly - or quickly - you build up this crappy little mud hut until it becomes a kind of granny flat, and then a tiny one by one house, and then when the foundations are a bit stronger you kind of start adding rooms with new areas of vocabulary and suddenly there's a whole new gable of the pluplerfect subjunctive blah coming off one side and you're doing a bang up job of decorating that place with all sorts of cute adjectives and expressions and everyday slang.

Linguistic real estate, right?

But as home owners know, when do you ever stop? You don't stop. It's never finished. You'll be doing home renovations and touch up jobs for the rest of your life, if you let yourself.

The question is, then, when do you redirect some of the energy you're putting into beautifying this one piece of lingustic real estate, into a whole nother pile of sticks and mud? Can you work on both places at once? What if you put all your energy into this new shack of language and then you go back to your old place and now your interior design is so last year and also the whole west wing has collapsed because your supporting wall wasn't that supporting after all?

Okay, enough with the analogies, you get the picture.

So here's my problem in real terms. I'm feeling pretty good about my Welsh ar hyn o bryd. I can have an interesting conversation without relying too heavily on English and without asking for every second word to be repeated (just every third) so long as my conversation partner is... talking... like... this... I mean, I really feel like I've come a long way. I'm even sometimes starting to think of myself as bilingual (NO WHAT? ADDING THAT to the list of things to blog about).

And now I'm starting to dip my toes into Lithuanian (there's a reason, legit) but I don't want to stop learning Welsh but I'm not sure I can do both at once or you know, hey, how do I do this?

• is there a point where I can say "yup, my Welsh is at this level and this is a good place to take a breather"?
• can I learn two languages at once?
• if so, how?
• do I study them on different days of the week? different settings? one at home and one at work? (no I don't sit at my desk going through vocab what who said that?)
• do I even have the energy to start over with a swamp hut?
• what if one language inteferes with the other?

Answers on a post card, please.