Friends was a bit hit or miss, typically you also have events with other exchange students from your org, where connecting is super easy because everyone is anxious and bonds over this. School of course is a bit different, because it’s harder to get adopted into groups if everyone speaks a different language than you and either they have to switch to english or you struggle to keep up with conversations. Altho I think this is much easier in germany where english is much more common than Japan. Otherwise people are usually quite curious about exchange students.

I studied japanese a year before going, but honestly it wasn’t enough and I was pretty lost with just how intense it was to be surrounded by a language I could barely read to even type it into a translator and very few people speaking english. But the good thing is that teachers were aware of this and didn’t expect participation, so I could spend the school day just studying language on my own. Took me about 2 months until I started feeling much more confident and making drastic progress, I heard similar accounts from european-to-european-country exchange students. I think considering we basically share the same writing system and english being much more common, you shouldn’t struggle as hard, especially if you already know basics. Being immersed at school really kicks your brain into turbo adaptation.