By Aylin Aarhus
Students congregated in the St. Mary’s Hall Multipurpose Room on Oct. 10 to celebrate Hangul Day, which commemorates the invention of the Korean alphabet.
At the celebration, held by the School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, students played games, did calligraphy, and learned about Korean history.
The celebration attracted students from inside and outside the Korean program, which instructs students in Korean language, culture and linguistics, according to the School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures website.
Students played several Korean games, including gonggi, a children’s game traditionally played with small stones. Players toss a stone into the air and try to grab another stone and catch the first one as it comes down. The game gets progressively more difficult, with players having to catch more stones each time.
Another game was yunnori, a traditional board game played with sticks rather than dice. Sticks are tossed in the air, and how they land determines how many places around the board a player moves. Players aim to get all of their pieces around the board first.
Nathan Lopilato, a sophomore international relations major, heard about the event from a friend who lives in St. Mary’s, home to UMD’s foreign language immersion program.
“My only background in Korean is counting to 10,” Lopilato said. “So it’s useful to have an event that I can attend as a non-Korean speaker so that I can learn a little bit about Korean culture.”
Hangul is a writing system with a unique history. Before the 15th century, Korean was primarily written using Chinese characters. Koreans who didn’t have a formal education, including much of the lower class and many women, were largely illiterate.
In the 1440s, King Sejong worked with royal scholars to create an early version of Hangul, a simplified writing system which he hoped would promote literacy among the lower class.
Hyeran Ryu, a second-year PhD student in the Second Language Acquisition program, was a middle school teacher in South Korea before coming to the U.S. to pursue her PhD.
“I was in the States 10 years ago as an exchange student,” Ryu said. “In the school where I studied, there were Chinese and Japanese classes, but they didn’t have Korean classes.”
UMD has a Korean Studies minor, but no major, unlike Chinese and Japanese. Ryu said she would like to see the Korean program continue to develop.
“I can see that it’s growing,” Ryu said of the program. “I hope when I graduate, this department’s going to be even bigger.”
Dean White, a sophomore theater design production major, attended the celebration with his Elementary Korean class.
“I think the Korean program at the university is awesome,” White said. “Especially in our location that has so many Korean immigrants, it’s important to be able to learn the language and learn the culture.”
Featured Image: Students compete to answer trivia about Korean history and culture during the Hangul Day celebration in St. Mary’s Hall, Oct. 10, 2025. Photo by Christian Lee