I did one year of Spanish in uni and failed miserably. After living a few seasons in Ibiza and Mallorca I picked up the local dialects and have Catalan and Basque in-laws. Found Catalan quite easy to pick up and would consider myself pretty close to fluent in Spanish albeit with some very peculiar accents and grammatical quirks. I’d say learning them simultaneously helped me.
I did one year of Spanish in uni and failed miserably. After living a few seasons in Ibiza and Mallorca I picked up the local dialects and have Catalan and Basque in-laws. Found Catalan quite easy to pick up and would consider myself pretty close to fluent in Spanish albeit with some very peculiar accents and grammatical quirks. I’d say learning them simultaneously helped me.