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There is also a Japanese language version: http://www.i.u-tokyo.ac.jp/edu/entra/pdf/archive/16math_j.pdf http://www.i.u-tokyo.ac.jp/edu/entra/pdf/archive/16mat

• lovich 10y ago
  That's interesting. I know Japanese has multiple scripts. Problems 1 and 3 appear to be in a much simpler script that looks less dense. Problem 2 is using whatever script that looks closer to Chinese and is full of much more complicated characters. Is there a reason for that? Did Japan import whatever concept question 2 is about from China and developed the math for the other questions independently?
  • sithadmin 10y ago
    As someone with moderate Japanese literacy, I don't really see the distinction between the problems that you're referencing. All problems here are using the same mix of phonetic and logographic characters, which is typical of modern written Japanese. >Did Japan import whatever concept question 2 is about from China and developed the math for the other questions independently? Very unlikely. Japanese concepts expressed by the borrowed Chinese logographic script (known locally as kanji) are frequently quite different than the meaning that would be expressed in Chinese. Additionally, choosing to write a text with relatively dense usage of kanji characters doesn't necessarily imply anything meaningful. For one, the swap between phonetic script and kanji often plays the role that the empty 'space' character plays in western languages. Sometimes the concepts being discussed include words that are homophones/homographs that are difficult to distinguish between in phonetic script, but are easy to distinguish with kanji. For instance, 'hashi' = chopsticks or bridge depending on emphasis. Aside from use of context it's not necessarily clear what you mean if you spell it out, but there are two distinct kanji for either 'chopsticks' or 'bridge' that are usually known, so it's easier to use those to ward off ambiguity. In other cases, choices between use of phonetic scripts or kanji simply comes down to nothing more than convention.
    • glandium 10y ago
      > For instance, 'hashi' = chopsticks or bridge depending on emphasis. or edge. For the curious readers, since you didn't include the corresponding chinese characters: hashi (chopsticks): 箸 hashi (bridge): 橋 hashi (edge): 端
  • ldjb 10y ago
    The Japanese language uses three scripts: kanji, hiragana and katakana. Both kanji (the complicated-looking script which is imported from Chinese) and hiragana (the simpler-looking alphabet unique to the Japanese language) are used in all three problems. Katakana — used for (normally English) loan words — appears a few times in the first two problems and look quite simple with mostly sharp, straight lines. I think this exam paper represents how the Japanese language is normally used, with kanji for the main nouns and verbs, hiragana to modify and conjugate, and the occasional loan word in katakana (for tribonacci, rank, vector and Euler-Lagrange) as necessary. I don't think the second problem has particularly more kanji than the other problems.
  • TorKlingberg 10y ago
    All three problems descriptions use all three scripts. I think problem 2 uses a heavier font, for no clear reason. The English version is the same. Maybe the problem maker submitted it as bitmaps rather than Latex source.
    • glandium 10y ago
      It appears that in the PDF, problem 2 is an image, while problem 1 is pure text.
  • rotator 10y ago
    Japanese uses three scripts, and each one coincidentally appears more prominently in one of the three problems than in the others: 1. Katakana is a sparse, alphabetic script used to transcribe sounds. Problem 1 looks sparse because much of the space is used to phonetically spell out the word "tribonacci". 2. Kanji is a dense, glyphic script used to express ideas. Problem 2 looks dense because big words like "surface area" and "twice differentiable" are translated to their native equivalents. 3. Hiragana is a sparse, alphabetic script used to add grammatical structure. Problem 3 looks sparse because of the high number of prepositions and auxiliary words like "in", "be", and "of".
  • lovich 10y ago
    For everyone replying I understand that Japanese has 3 fonts, what I am pointing out here is that the second question is using what appears to be the more complicated font or it just happens to be using characters that require many more strokes than in the other two questions. Compare the average number of strokes per character between question 2 and the other questions to see what I mean. My question is whether this is due to some historical or cultural reason, or just happens to be coincidence
    • ldjb 10y ago
      All three questions use a combination of kanji and hiragana. To me, the average number of strokes per character in all three questions look about the same. The second question does use quite a lot of kanji with lots of strokes, but so do the other questions. If I'm just not seeing it and there are indeed more complicated kanji in the second question, then it's probably mostly a coincidence, although complicated concepts are often represented by complicated kanji.
      • lovich 10y ago
        Thank you for the answer. Not being able to recognize which script is which, it was difficult to tell if it was a coincidence or not