Sorry if this this might be too open ended but I’m hoping I can get some ideas of things to pay attention to. Ty.
E.g.: When to speak up and when to listen. When to agree and when to offer an opinion. When to laugh and when to remain silent. What kind of gestures you should use. Anything else you can think of.
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I think a lot of that stuff is really situation dependent. Like, I decided when to listen quietly vs when to speak up based on whether or not I have something to say about the topic at hand? My behavior doesn’t really change based on the language, at least not in a way I’m consciously aware of. Japanese people also don’t expect you to behave 100% like a Japanese person. A lot of people like befriending foreigners specifically because of our different points of view/culture/mannerisms
The only thing I can think of in this vein is that humor is really hard to transfer. My jokes literally never landed so I just stopped making them. It took a couple of years for me to figure out comedic timing, tone, etc and now my jokes sometimes land lol. So yeah just expect to not be funny for the first while
Less a cultural thing and more just a language learning thing, but learners often get so caught up thinking about *what* they’re saying that they forget to think about *how* they’re saying it – ie the tone. In any language the tone with which you say something effects the meaning. How tone is used to convey emotion is the same in Japanese in English, but I noticed both for myself and for Japanese people speaking English, that when you’re focusing really hard on how to construct the sentence, sometime you end up using a harsher or more unfriendly tone without realizing it. So that’s something to watch out for