Language courses. Check if your uni offers language classes for students and pick an obscure one (that is not English and possibly not Japanese unless you fancy Japanese culture). In my experience it's a setting which forces conversations and sometimes surprisingly deep ones (how many of your classmates know what's your favourite color? Well the ones from the language class do after an exercise of color words).
Similarly maybe the uni or someone else in the town runs language cafe's. Informal places where people who learn a language will show up to talk with natives.
Look around if the uni has student clubs around an interest. My university had a ton of such "student circles" some of them were for people more than normally interested in the faculty's discipline, some were about something completely different. They should allow people in based on interest, not affiliation and an active one is a great experience.