Today I was curious about converting my name into Kanji and my first name was easy to convert (Luke into 龍駆), but for my last name, I'm really struggling with.
Whenever I try to find solutions, I either have to go through and manually try combinations (through dictionaries, which is a nightmare) or computer generated examples, which aren't great (for example 磨闇徒 (no idea how to interpret this), 魔庵受 (accepting the devil's retreat?), 磨塩厨 (kitchen of polished salt?)).
Can you add a tool where you can put, for example, your name in and it'll provide a list of kanji combinations (preferably with definitions) that'll work?
I am visualising this like a bunch of wheels with the kanji on then, and you can rotate the wheels and see the definitions, and see if you like them. (Idk, I can't really visualise this well)
If you wanted to map your name onto kanji by breaking it into syllables, you can just type the sound your looking for in the dictionary here, and it will give you a list of kanji. with that reading e.g. ru, ku (Note that, for names. more often than not, the kunyomi pronunciation is used instead of the onyomi)
However, if you follow that approach, unless you can find that combination of kanji in the name search tool, it is unlikely that anyone will know how to say that name. So, you would need to put furigana over the kanji, to tell readers how to pronounce it. (For something like this the furigana would be in katakana)
Given that you will probably need to use furigana, an alternative approach is to just pick any kanji you want (completely ignoring their standard readings) and slap the furigana on top.
Given that you will probably need to use furigana, an alternative approach is to just pick any kanji you want (completely ignoring their standard readings) and slap the furigana on top.
My point of view on this is I want it to, at least make sense (so I'm not mocking the language) e.g lu becoming ryuu (sounds close enough る would be better although 龍 (りゅう) is far too tempting).
It just seems like there should be a dedicated tool somewhere to do this well (as in not sifting through hundreds of Kanji and thousands of possible combinations).
I know it's not the most important thing to know, but it, at least, would be a cool thing to be able to do (most useful I can think of at the moment is making a hanko out of it).
Given my overly limited time, this is probably not something I'll be able to do without sacrificing time on a larger tool/feature that helps a larger group of users.
This does seem like a tool that someone could make without needing the something a "big" as renshuu behind it. Given how even native English speakers do not know how to pronounce many names without hearing them first, though, I feel that a tool like this would be extremely difficult to do *well*. A name like Luke has much simpler sounds (and even then, do you go with ルー, or リュ), but a lot of names will not break down so easily that a system can split them up and suggest Japanese sounds.
