October 9th is celebrated as Hangul Day in Korea to commemorate King Sejong, the man who is credited with creating the written language that Koreans have used since 1443. Before this, Koreans used Chinese characters (called “Hanja” in Korea) as their written language, but the king decided that hanja was too difficult for the common folk to understand, and that Korea needed a written language that everyone could use.
This was fairly revolutionary at the time where the common opinion on the topic was that written communication was for the elite only.
Fun fact: Centuries later the Hawaiian King Kamehameha would come to a similar conclusion when he decided that all Hawaiians should learn to read and write when he was offered the chance himself, rebuffing the notion that only the royal family should have that privilege.
Hangul Day means that I get a day off from school, but yesterday it meant that part of our class was devoted to trying out our skills at calligraphy.
Joachim cheated and decided to write some Japanese while the teachers weren’t looking.
Korean calligraphy is a lot harder than it looks.
Do you know how to write anything in Hangul?