How long is 3,600 Japanese characters?

Written continuously without line breaks, 3,600 Japanese characters fill exactly 9 sheets of 400-square manuscript paper (genko yoshi) — 180 lines in total — and roughly 2.5 A4 pages at a common 40 × 36 layout. Reading it aloud takes 12 min; silent reading about 7 min 12 sec.

Conversion table

FormatApproximate size
400-square manuscript paper (genko yoshi, 20 × 20)9 sheets (180 lines)
800-square manuscript paper (20 × 40)4.5 sheets
A4 page (40 chars × 36 lines = 1,440 chars)about 2.5 pages
Reading aloud (300 characters/min)about 12 min
Silent reading (500 characters/min)about 7 min 12 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 exactly 9 sheets of 400-square manuscript paper

Text with more kanji looks denser on the page, while hiragana-heavy text looks lighter. The same 3,600 characters can feel quite different, so check the kanji ratio too (the character counter measures it).

How these numbers are calculated

Where 3,600 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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