Brief Spotlight: Minnie Norgaisse '19

Mike Lovett

Hometown: Shirley, Massachusetts.

Studies: Major in East Asian studies; minors in linguistics, and international and global studies.

Career plans: Teach English in Korea for a year, then attend graduate school in Asian studies.
Possibly work for the U.S. Department of State.

Motto: "Try for anything and everything, because you never know what could fall into your lap."

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She was studying in China on a Boren Scholarship last spring when she took the pledge. Afterward, she was a little scared and intimidated. Sometimes, she was silent. Occasionally, she resorted to hand gestures.

The promise Minnie Norgaisse ’19 made? To speak only Mandarin, never English, no matter how limited her vocabulary or great her frustration, during a six-month intensive language course at Beijing’s Capital Normal University. Her language skills grew “by leaps and bounds,” she says, and now she is conversationally fluent in Mandarin, able to hold forth on topics ranging from the environment to politics.

Because Mandarin has thousands and thousands of Chinese characters, “studying it means coming to terms with the fact that you’ll never recognize every character,” Norgaisse says. “The key is learning to be OK with that.”

Mandarin is just one of three East Asian languages Norgaisse is mastering at Brandeis. After self-studying Korean in high school in Lexington, Massachusetts, she continued studying it at Brandeis and last semester also picked up Japanese.

The polyglot started out at Brandeis focused on computer science but switched to East Asian studies at the end of her first year. She’s never looked back. “There aren’t enough hours in the day to study all the languages I want to learn,” she says. The daughter of Haitian immigrants, she reports she can also “hold her own” in French.

Even though her parents still hint they wouldn’t mind if she became a doctor, Norgaisse is completely happy at the nexus of Far Eastern language and culture. Studying abroad has allowed her to visit iconic places like the Great Wall in China and the DMZ in Korea (“easily the most profound moment of my time in Korea,” she says).

“It took some courage to make the switch to study what I like,” says Norgaisse. “But it’s so much easier to do something you have a passion for, because the passion is what will see you through.”