OLIVIA Cain-Rojas can speak five languages.
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Alongside her mother Laura, the pair run a language school above a shopfront on Liebig Street in Warrnambool.
Both from Spain, they offer French, Spanish or Italian, but the queues are short for those languages.
“The English students are the ones we have the most of,” Ms Cain-Rojas said.
There’s big demand from Warrnambool’s population of Korean, Japanese and Taiwanese workers for English — it’s three times as popular as any other language at the school.
Most migrants live together making progress on their new tongue slow.
So last Sunday the call went out — bring along food and cuisine from your home country and have a chat, all washed down with the Spanish drink sangria.
“We thought we’d get all of our students together because the English students don’t get much chance to speak to English-speaking Australians, even if they’re living in Australia,” Ms Cain-Rojas said.
“We started two or three years ago but English has built up in the past couple of months. Most of them work at Midfield and they just don’t get an opportunity to speak English.”
s.mccomish@fairfaxmedia.com.au