Love Power

I wanted to make Japanese ateji — choosing kanji for their sound rather than meaning — accessible to people who can't read Japanese. Most existing "name to kanji" tools do a literal meaning-based conversion that often produces unnatural or nonsensical results.

So instead, I built Love Power around a curated phonetic dictionary rather than an AI call at runtime. That keeps the app fully offline and fast — but curating the dictionary itself was the hard part. Every sound has multiple kanji candidates, and getting the combinations to actually read as natural ateji (instead of a random, unintentional meaning clash) took a lot of manual tuning.

Features:

- Type any name (English, romanized, or katakana) → get kanji candidates instantly

- Shuffle through alternatives

- Full-screen brush-calligraphy preview, vertical writing option

- Save as an image

I shared an early version in r/kanji and got great feedback — people wanted to see what each kanji actually means so they can avoid picking a bad combination. That's the next update I'm prioritizing.

Free, ad-supported, no subscription: https://apps.apple.com/fr/app/love-power-kanji-name-maker/id6797538109

Curious if anyone else here has dealt with a similar "avoid the weird edge-case output" problem when building a rules-based generation feature instead of leaning on an LLM.