Free preview by email · no obligation
Most foreigners walk around China with a name that makes people smile.
Not a good smile. The one they hide behind their hand. A name generator matched your syllables and stopped there. A Chinese name has to survive four more things than that — sound, meaning, tone and what the two characters happen to spell when you put them together. Give us your email and we will send back the characters that survive, plus a seal drawn for you, before you pay anything.
Takes about 40 seconds. No card, no trial that quietly bills you.
The problem
Your current name is doing less for you than you think
A Chinese name is not a translation. It is the thing colleagues use to introduce you, what appears on your contract, what a teacher calls on in class, and what gets inked on someone's arm in ten years. Get it wrong and it is a small, permanent embarrassment you cannot explain away, because everyone around you is too polite to mention it.
| What a generator gives you | What a Chinese speaker hears |
|---|---|
| 八 associates with 王霸八 (internet meme name); 巴 less risky | |
| 爱人 (spouse/lover) — 艾仁 reads as a claim of marriage | |
| shit | |
| 卫生 (hygiene) — 卫生/魏声 reads as 'sanitation' | |
| 屎 (excrement) / 死 (death) — tone-dependent, must be reviewer-checked |
Every one of those scanned correctly as a name. The pinyin matched. The characters were real characters with real meanings. They are still wrong, and no free tool will tell you so, because telling you so is the whole job.
Why it matters
Six places a good name quietly works for you
Making friends, not being a novelty
Chinese people want to give you a name; it is how they include you. One chosen properly means the joke is over and the conversation can continue.
Work and contracts
Your Chinese name appears on paperwork, WeChat groups and business cards. A name that reads as childish costs you credibility in a first meeting you will never know happened.
The HSK speaking test
Examiners ask your name. A polyphone you cannot pronounce, or a name that sounds like a household appliance, is a bad first thirty seconds on test day.
Dating and WeChat
Your name is the first line of every profile. It is also the thing their friends will read out loud.
Before you tattoo it
People already pay native speakers to check Chinese tattoos. Do it before the needle, not after, and get it in writing.
A gift that is actually about them
A name, a seal, and a video of someone reading it out loud. Nothing on this page is more personal for the money.
A real screening run, produced by our software. You get this list with your order.
The mechanism
Why a name generator cannot catch this
It works on sound. Chinese works on sound and meaning and tone, and the failure modes are invisible unless you grew up inside the language.
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Same syllables, different word
Two characters can be a perfectly reasonable name and also, read together, the word for spouse, hygiene, or brain. Only the second reading is what people hear first.
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Tones dropped, insults appear
Written without tones for a Western audience, some romanisations spell English words. Chinese speakers read them both ways at once. You do not find out.
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Characters with two readings
Half the characters a generator likes are polyphones. You will be called one name and read another.
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Register and era
Some perfectly correct names sound like your landlord, or like a cartoon. Software has no idea. A person who has heard a few thousand names does.
We automate the first three — 10472 characters checked for every reading, 57097 common two-character words tested for clashes — and then we hand the survivors to a native speaker, because the fourth one is not automatable.
What you get
The pack, not a paragraph of text on a screen
Every image below came out of the same renderer that builds customer files.
How it works
Four steps, and the last one is a person
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You send us your name and what you want it to feel like
We do not ask for your birthday. No bazi, no five elements, no stroke numerology — that system was invented in 1928 by a Japanese name scholar and it does not explain why a name sounds good.
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We generate candidates and screen them
Nine automated checks remove the traps above. This is the part that takes milliseconds and is why your preview arrives by email rather than in a week.
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A native speaker decides
They confirm one of the survivors or pick different characters, and they record your name out loud so you cannot be wrong about how it is said.
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Files arrive on a link that expires
3–5 days, because review and recording happen in batches. If we could do it faster by skipping the person, we would be selling a generator.
Fair questions
What people ask before ordering
Why not just use a free generator?
You can, and you will get a name that scans as plausible. The failure is invisible, which is the entire problem: you will not know your name is a joke, because nobody will tell you. They will just find it charming.
My Chinese friend already gave me one.
Then you have a name chosen out of politeness in thirty seconds, which is exactly how the bad ones happen. Nothing wrong with asking a person who does this on purpose to look at it. Our free check does the mechanical half of that right now.
Why pay when you could just learn the language?
You could. This is the four-hour version of the four-year version.
Is this fortune-telling?
No. We work on sound, meaning, tone, register and how hard the characters are to write. If you want a name calculated from your birth hour, myfate and the five-element tools do that and we will not pretend otherwise.
What if I do not like what you send?
Full refund before the reviewer signs off, no argument. After that, if the name is wrong we redo the review. The larger pack also includes one revision round.
I have never heard of you. Why should I trust this?
You do not have to. Take the name you are using right now and put it through the free check. If it turns up something you can confirm — a word you did not intend, a reading you cannot pronounce — you have just tested our judgement on your own case, for nothing. Then decide whether the paid review is worth it.
What happens to my email address?
It gets the preview and your delivery link. No list, no resale, and the delivery link stops working after 72 hours so a forwarded email is useless to someone else.
See what survives the screening for your name
Free, by email, in about a minute. You will see the characters, the pinyin, what each one means, and a seal drawn for you. Watermarked, because the unwatermarked files are what you would be buying.