For some reason, name readings never stick with me via exposure and I’m better off just SRSing them with Anki.
I tried a couple Anki decks for top 500 or 1000 names, but all seemed a bit… suspect with the common readings they were listing for various names.
Is there any reliable resource where you can look up a name’s kanji, and tell how common each possible reading is for it?
If two readings are both relatively common for a name, I’d like to learn both. But if one is common and one is quite rare, I don’t want to put in the effort to learn the unusual one at this time, unless/until I come across it myself in the wild.
There are sites that effectively function as baby naming sites for parents to use, which will tell you the rankings of various kanji, and then also the popularity of names that use those kanji, but I don’t know that any of them break it down by reading…
The problem is that given names are very personal, and parents can really do anything they want. They don’t have to follow rules for what readings are common or anything.
I don’t want to be in the business of telling people what they should or shouldn’t study, but I really can’t see studying given names as being a good use of time, especially when many Japanese people have to ask how to read names they’ve never seen before.
I don’t think anyone breaks down individual readings by frequency.
This site has surname rankings, but just for the kanji orthography.
So, for instance, they will tell you that 清水 is ranked #20 nationally, and that about 535,000 people have those kanji for that name, but there’s no way to tell for certain among those people how they read it.
They just list out しみず, しみす, しみづ, きよみず, and せいすい
The fact that they all exist means you can never be 100% certain.