Ask foreigners who have lived in Taiwan a while and you get an oddly consistent answer. They love it here. A lot of them arrived planning to stay two years and are still around a decade later, with a Mandarin habit they never expected to acquire and a group chat full of Taiwanese friends. The big expat surveys back this up, putting Taiwan near the top of the world for local friendliness and for feeling welcome, year after year.
And yet almost every one of those people, if you ask about their first six months, will describe a stretch of being quite alone. Both of these are true, and the reason they are both true is the most useful thing I can tell you.
My first few months here, I was really trying to read and hear between the lines. To understand what people meant when they said things, whether it was in a meeting room or talking to a cashier at 7-11, and to work out the standard procedure for how things were done here, the so-called SOP. That is a strange kind of tiredness, and it is not one you can explain easily to friends back home, because on paper nothing bad is happening to you.
It was never reluctance
The mistake I made early on was reading the gap as distance. You meet people who are visibly warm, who go out of their way for you, who invite you to things, and then somehow it does not compound into the kind of friendship where someone texts you on a Tuesday. It is easy to conclude that there is an inner circle you are not being admitted to.
That is not what is happening. What is happening is that friendship needs a shared medium, and for most of the people around you that medium is Mandarin or Taiwanese, not English. Your colleague who is generous and funny with her friends becomes careful and quiet in English, because she is doing the work of translation while you are doing none of it. Add to that the ordinary reference points that friendships are built from, the childhood shows, the school pressure everyone survived, the family logic of a Lunar New Year visit, and the unwritten rules I spent my first months trying to decode. It is not that people are keeping you out. They are meeting you at the edge of what can be carried across.
This is genuinely good news, because a gap made of language and shared reference is a gap that closes. Reluctance would not close. This does, in both directions, faster than you would think.
The arithmetic that reframed it for me
A researcher at the University of Kansas tried to put numbers on friendship a few years ago, surveying hundreds of adults who had recently moved to a new city and asking how many hours they had spent with people they met after the move. The thresholds he landed on were roughly fifty hours together before someone becomes a casual friend, ninety before they are properly a friend, two hundred or more before you would call them close.
The detail worth keeping is that not all hours count equally. Time spent working next to someone barely registers. He found people who had logged hundreds of hours with a colleague and still called them an acquaintance. What counts is time doing something together with no purpose beyond doing it. Eating, walking, playing, sitting around after.
I found this liberating rather than depressing, because it explains the first six months without anyone having to be at fault. Nobody is rejecting you. You have simply not yet spent the hours, and neither has anyone else, because you arrived three months ago and everyone else has had their Wednesday evenings booked since university.
It also explains why the standard advice to newcomers underdelivers. A drinks night three hours long, every quarter, where you meet a fresh set of faces each time, adds up to about twelve hours a year spread across dozens of people. Those evenings are generous and I have enjoyed plenty of them. They are just not the machine that produces the Tuesday text message, and it is worth knowing that going in so you do not read the outcome as a verdict on yourself or on Taiwan.
What actually accumulates hours
Once you see it as hours rather than chemistry, the answer becomes almost boringly practical. You want something that repeats on a fixed day, has an activity at its centre, and involves roughly the same people each time.
Running groups. Climbing gyms where the same faces appear after work. Badminton and basketball, both of which this country plays constantly. A choir, a cooking class that runs for twelve weeks rather than one afternoon, a temple or church community, a volunteer roster, a Toastmasters club, a language exchange that survives past the third meeting. None of it is aimed at foreigners, which is exactly why it works.
The quiet advantage of these settings is that they do not require you to be interesting. The activity carries the encounter. You are not performing across a language gap over a loud bar; you are running, or belaying, or chopping something, and the talking happens sideways in the gaps. That is also, conveniently, the format in which your Mandarin improves fastest, because the vocabulary is concrete and repeated and attached to things you are physically doing.
People here generally appreciate you showing up consistently. As long as you make the effort to communicate and they can see that you are willing to blend in, you will feel accepted. It goes both ways. I have been to running clubs and to church, and people are trying to help. I made a lot of friends at church, and they even stood by me during my rough times here. For that, I really appreciate it from the bottom of my heart.
That last part is the thing I would most want a newcomer to understand. The people who carried me through my hardest stretch in Taiwan were not people I met at a networking event. They were people who saw me every week for long enough to notice when something was wrong.
Go four times
The rule I give everyone now is to commit to four visits before deciding anything.
The first time you will feel like you are intruding and you will leave early. The second time someone will recognise you, which registers as nothing at the moment and is in fact everything. By the third or fourth, a conversation will resume rather than start, and that resumption is the whole mechanism. Most people go once, judge the experience on that single visit, and conclude it is hard to get to know people here. It is not hard. It is slow at the start and then it accelerates, and almost everybody quits during the slow part.
Pick one thing rather than five. One you can genuinely sustain on a wet Wednesday in November.
The Mandarin, honestly
I arrived speaking Mandarin, so I want to be careful not to prescribe from a comfortable position. But I have watched enough people do this without the language to say something useful about it.
I have friends from France and the United States who have been here more than five years and have a mixed circle of local friends and friends from other countries. None of them arrived fluent. They started using the language badly, early, in low-stakes places, and let the group carry them.
That is the pattern I keep seeing. The people who thrive here are almost never the ones who waited until their Mandarin was good enough. A running club will happily absorb someone with forty words of Mandarin if that person keeps showing up and keeps trying. What people respond to is not fluency, it is the visible willingness to meet halfway, because it signals that you are here rather than passing through. Friendships form on both sides of a very partial vocabulary, held together mostly by patience and repetition.
And the return on it compounds in a way that surprises people. The warmth was always there. Language is what lets it land somewhere.
This is one person’s account, and five years in one city is not the whole story. If yours went differently, better or worse, reply and tell me what worked. I would rather this piece carry a dozen experiences than mine alone, and I will credit you if you want me to.