Questions to Ask a Foreign Exchange Student
Twenty questions for host families, classmates, and teachers talking with an exchange student. They stay away from asking anyone to explain their entire country, and focus instead on the practical and specific: school at home, language fatigue, food they cannot find, what nobody thought to explain, and what will feel strange when they go back.
The questions
Open any question for the note
How long have you been here, and how much time do you have left?
Why ask it
Where they are in the stay changes everything else. Week two is jet lag and logistics; month four or five is often a slump, when the novelty has gone and home is still far away. Knowing the departure date also stops you planning things too late to happen.
How is your name said at home, and has anyone here got it right yet?
Why ask it
Most exchange students accept a mangled version of their name within a week and then never correct anybody. Asking gives permission to correct you, and getting it right is one of the few things they will remember from that first month.
What did you pack that you are glad you brought?
Why ask it
The answer is usually small and surprising: a pillow, a particular medicine, photos, their own knife. It shows what comfort looks like for them, and often reveals something they could not find here and have quietly gone without.
What time does the school day start where you are from, and how long does it run?
Why ask it
School structure differs more than food does: start times, day length, whether students move rooms or teachers do, how much homework counts as normal. It is the difference they feel every morning and almost never get asked about.
What has been hardest to work out here that nobody thought to explain?
Why ask it
The most practically useful question on this list. Expect washing machines, bus transfers, tipping, how to ask a teacher for help, how much food you can take without asking. Whatever they name, you can usually fix it the same afternoon.
What food here have you not been able to make sense of?
Why ask it
Better than asking what they like, because confusion is easy to discuss and does not require them to be polite. Portion sizes, sweetened bread, cold breakfast, and root beer come up more often than anything else.
What do you eat at home that you cannot find here?
Why ask it
It is usually one specific ingredient rather than a whole cuisine. Finding it, or driving them to a shop that stocks it, does more for homesickness than several conversations about how they are settling in.
How often do you speak to people back home, and what time do you have to be awake for it?
Why ask it
Time zones shape the emotional pattern of the stay. Someone getting up at five to catch their family at dinner is carrying something invisible to the household. It also tells you which evenings they would rather have to themselves.
What is something you still have to translate in your head every day?
Why ask it
The mental work of a second language is invisible to everyone around them. Answers are concrete: prices, temperatures, dates, distances, shoe sizes. It explains why someone goes quiet in a group after an hour.
What do people here say that you had to learn was not literal?
Why ask it
Idioms and jokes are where otherwise fluent speakers get stranded. The question is fun rather than heavy, and it lets them display competence, which is rare for somebody who spends most of the day being corrected.
How tiring is it to speak another language all day?
Why ask it
Naming the fatigue tends to come as a relief. It is also useful information: a student who is silent at dinner may be exhausted rather than unhappy, and from the outside those two look identical.
What did you picture this place being like before you came?
Why ask it
Expectations mostly come from films and television, and comparing them to reality is genuinely funny. It also surfaces disappointments they have been too polite to mention: a smaller town, longer distances, quieter weekends.
What do people assume about where you are from that is not true?
Why ask it
Every exchange student collects a set of lazy assumptions, some flattering and some not. Asking lets them correct the record without seeming prickly, and you will hear the specific thing that has irritated them for months.
What questions are you tired of being asked?
Why ask it
Answered honestly, this saves you from repeating them. Usual candidates are whether their country has some ordinary object, and being asked to sum up a whole nation in a sentence. It also signals that you would rather be interesting than typical.
Is there something you are missing at home while you are here?
Why ask it
An exchange year overlaps with birthdays, a wedding, a grandparent's illness, a sibling's last year in the house. Naming the loss makes it lighter to carry, and it warns you which weeks are likely to be hard.
What is something you know how to do that nobody here has thought to ask you about?
Why ask it
Exchange students get treated as visitors rather than as people with skills. Someone who repairs bicycles, plays piano, cooks well, or swims competitively usually stops doing it entirely while abroad. Ask, then make room for it.
What would you like to do while you are here that has not been arranged yet?
Why ask it
There is nearly always an unspoken list: see the ocean, go to a live game, visit a city three hours away. Most students will not raise it because they already feel like a guest, so asking outright is usually the only way it happens.
What has surprised you about how people here spend a weekend?
Why ask it
Weekend rhythms differ more than any single tradition: how late people sleep, whether Sunday belongs to family, how much of the day is spent driving. It is a way into real differences without asking anyone to explain their culture.
What do you think will feel strange about going home?
Why ask it
Coming home unsettles almost everyone, and few students are warned about it. Raising it early, that friends will have moved on, that they will have changed in ways nobody at home saw happen, makes the return less disorienting.
What would you take back with you, and what will you be glad to leave behind?
Why ask it
Asking for both halves keeps the answer honest. What they would take is usually a habit rather than a place, and what they are glad to leave gives you an unusually frank view of your own home.
Hosting the conversation
Practical guidance for the conversation itself
The first two weeks
- Explain the things too obvious to explain: whether food in the kitchen is available without asking, how long a shower is normal, whether doors get locked, what time the house goes quiet. Guessing wrong at these is the main source of early awkwardness.
- Write the address, the wifi password, and two phone numbers on paper and hand it over. Phones die, and a student who cannot say where they live will not go anywhere alone.
- Walk the route to school and to one shop with them once. Independence arrives faster after a single guided trip than after any amount of reassurance.
- Expect politeness to hide problems for the first month. Yes and it is fine are often placeholders, so ask narrow questions rather than how are you settling in.
The middle of the stay
Somewhere around the third or fourth month most exchange students hit a flat stretch. The novelty has worn off, the language is still tiring, friendships at school have hardened into groups, and the return home is still months away. It rarely looks like sadness. It looks like a student staying in their room, sleeping a great deal, or being on the phone constantly. What helps is small and structural: a standing weekly thing they are expected at, a task in the household that is genuinely theirs, and one trip on the calendar to look forward to. Asking directly whether this is a hard stretch usually gets an honest answer, because by then they know you well enough.
Asking without making them a spokesperson
- Ask about their house, their school, their town. Questions about their country ask one seventeen-year-old to represent millions of people, and the answers get vague because they have to.
- Do not open with politics, religion, or conflict. If they raise it, listen and do not argue the point with someone who has nowhere else to go that evening.
- Ask what they think of something here rather than what is different about home. It puts them in the position of observer rather than exhibit.
- Let them be funny about your country. Defensiveness at the first joke closes off months of honest conversation.
Where hosts and classmates get it wrong
- Treating the year as a hosting performance. Ordinary evenings, chores, and being left alone matter more than outings, and students remember being treated as family rather than as a visitor.
- Correcting every mistake in their speech. Correct what stops you understanding them, and let the rest go, or they will speak less each week.
- Assuming silence means unhappiness. It often means the language ran out for the day.
- Forgetting they have a second set of parents watching from a distance. A short message or photo to the family at home costs nothing and eases a lot of worry.