How long is 300 Japanese characters?

Written continuously without line breaks, 300 Japanese characters fill 15 lines of 400-square manuscript paper (genko yoshi) and roughly 0.21 A4 pages at a common 40 × 36 layout. Reading it aloud takes 1 min; silent reading about 36 sec.

Conversion table

FormatApproximate size
400-square manuscript paper (genko yoshi, 20 × 20)0.75 sheets (15 lines)
800-square manuscript paper (20 × 40)0.38 sheets
A4 page (40 chars × 36 lines = 1,440 chars)about 0.21 pages
Reading aloud (300 characters/min)about 1 min
Silent reading (500 characters/min)about 36 sec

All figures assume full-width characters written continuously with no line breaks or spaces. Real text uses paragraphs and line breaks, so actual sheet counts tend to be higher.

What this volume looks like

Equivalent to 15 lines of 400-square manuscript paper

Text with more kanji looks denser on the page, while hiragana-heavy text looks lighter. The same 300 characters can feel quite different, so check the kanji ratio too (the character counter measures it).

How these numbers are calculated

Where 300 characters shows up

Character limits are counted differently by each service (full-width vs. half-width, emoji, URLs) and may change. For the latest limits, see the social media character limit guide.

Related tools

Nearby character counts

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