<p>Numerous studies have assessed the intercultural communication competence (ICC) of experienced interlocutors and have provided a variety of evidence elucidating their characteristics. In contrast, empirical research assessing the ICC of interlocutors with limited intercultural experience is exceedingly scarce. Understanding the characteristics of novices in intercultural communication is particularly important, as they may have unique learning needs during the initial stages of their development. The Global Competence Scale for graduate students (GCSG) was used to collect self-assessments of ICC from 246 students. Follow-up interviews were conducted with 18 respondents to examine challenges and affordances perceived by students in intercultural communication, as well as their actual reactions to these perceptions. The results indicate that participants rated their ICC as ‘upper-moderate’. More specifically, participants perceived their communication-related skills as weak and attributed to themselves a high degree of openness. We further identified two distinct clusters of participants, one of which exhibited significantly higher self-assessments across all dimensions compared to the other. Finally, we developed an overview of the participants’ engagement in intercultural interactions within process-oriented and result-oriented contexts. Based on these findings, we suggest that the language proficiency of students is correlated with both openness and motivation. Furthermore, building self-confidence and enhancing essential language skills correspond to the distinct core learning needs of the two clusters of students. We challenge the notion that external affordances are a prerequisite for triggering actual actions, instead proposing that the alignment of internal and external affordances is most likely to stimulate actual action. </p>