Hello !
I am a French student, 20 years old, who wants to study in Japan. I have a plan laid out but still a lot of questions that were a bit specific for me to find clear answers on google.
I am willing to go to a language school with the goal of learning enough to be able to attend a university/school in engineering 2 years later (i have already a basic knowledge about japanese, hiragana, katakana and a few basic kanjis as well as starter conversation, still limited). For the location, i saw that fukuoka and kyoto were pretty highly regarded and had very positive feedbacks for students, but with kyoto from what i've researched having much higher rent and living cost in general.
I really like the idea of being in kyoto over fukuoka (from the pictures, and comments from people who live here, i really enjoy the idea of a more culturally rich city like kyoto but please correct me if i'm wrong), but the comfort in terms of money i'd get for being there would much less than Fukuoka, which i would still enjoy.
I would love to have more opinions on the two cities, and maybe even other propositions about cities i might not know of with language schools in them.
Now the second point would be in terms of budget, especially train and food. I plan on renting an appartment or do a colocation, but i'm very unsure about the transportation costs. From what i've seen there are multiple companies like jr pass serving different lines and cards going from 7/14/21 days. i was willing to know if there was something similar to pass navigo in France, which is an annual pass for any transport in a region. I am asking with the idea of going every day of a week to the language school, and later to university, along with the cost.
For the food part, i was thinking about a 200€ budget per month, but once again, would that be enough or would i need more/less ? I am not a big spender and i don't go regularly to restaurants (15€+/meal), maybe once a month if i'm feeling like it. The more i can save the better, i've seen that some shops do big discounts late in the evening whoch i'd love to know more about.
The last part (yes sorry this is lenghty 🙂 ) would be about renting appartments. I've heard that agencies that specialize in foreigners are taking advantage of this to make rents much higher, but also, i've seen on websites like https://wagaya-japan.com/en/ that there were appartments with great prices for the size labelled as "corporate appartments". Would love to know if it's possible for a student to rent one. My goal would be to work once i get there to pay the rent but i'm not sure if it would be possible, so i was planning on doing a year of language school and then work the second year on the side.
Well thanks in advance for the answers, i hope you have a great day/evening
by SrRichterBel