

In episode 5 of _Boruto_ , we see Shino-sensei testing Boruto on "Ninja
Academy Math" or something along those lines, but when I look closely at the
texts, they don't seem like the usual Japanese characters to me.

[![enter image description
here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ryIg2.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/ryIg2.png)

I admit that my Japanese is not good but from the numerous anime that I have
watched, I feel like I can differentiate the more commonly used kanji when I
see them. But then I noticed that none of the ones there are distinguishable
to me. Does this have to do with Japanese math and numbers?


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question
japanese-language boruto
Why does the text of Shino-sensei's math problems look different from normal Japanese?


This is only a partial answer, which I'm posting since it seems too long for a
comment: I don't know Japanese well and I haven't followed _Boruto_ at all so
don't know about the language used in-universe. However, I have some knowledge
of kanji from knowing a modicum of Chinese.

To me, _some_ of this writing looks close enough to recognisable kanji, albeit
kanji written quickly and sloppily. (Here are some examples of such
handwriting, both in Japanese and Chinese:
[1](https://japanese.stackexchange.com/a/3196),
[2](https://www.hackingchinese.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/font-
feature.png). A web search for `messy chinese writing` generates some fairly
good examples in Chinese. I had less luck trying to find explicitly Japanese
examples from a quick search in English. Many of the results that appeared
were from foreign language learners, whose bad handwriting probably resulted
from lack of familiarity with kanji as a whole.) For instance, I can see
something that looks like
[解](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E8%A7%A3#Japanese), which would be
referring to the solution for the problem, on the left side. I can also see 甲
come up several times, but I don't know what it would be referring to. Some of
the writing also appears to be Latin/Greek characters used in maths: Vx
written in a cursive style is on one of the top lines of the solution.

I don't know if some of the writing here was drawn as meaningless scribbles,
but either way, Japanese maths doesn't use a vastly different set of
characters from other fields or languages. [Consider that web searches for
terms such as `東大 数学` (`tokyo university mathematics`) will only generate
results that look like a combination of normal maths writing and some Japanese
characters.]


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answer