mystery kanji (to me)

[Alcyone]

Can someone identify this kanji?


I'm making electronic flash cards for the Heisig "Remembering the Kanji" book. This is the kanji for his keyword "upright" (panel 55). My furigana dictionary and an online dictionary show 真 as the kanji for "upright". Is the above mystery kanji an alternate character or possibly an error?

Thanks!

edited to fix stray bbcode tag

[Bueller_007]

Not an error.

It means "virginity", "chastity", "fidelity", "loyalty", etc. He was using the word "upright" figuratively, I would imagine. i.e. "He is an upright citizen", etc.

On-yomi are テイ and ジョウ. You'll never see it used as kun-yomi, but it's ただしい, according to my kanwa-jiten:

http://tinyurl.com/33y86r

Not the most common of kanji, but it's Joyo, so it's one to be learned eventually, I guess.

[Alcyone]

どうもあ りがと ございました Bueller-さん!

That would explain why I wasn't finding the kanji under the English word upright.

I was able to copy-paste the character you linked for my flash card. I don't know if it's my Mac's implementation of Japanese (American English keyboard) or my ineptitude in hunting and picking kanji with it, but the on yomi and kun yomi didn't bring it up as a choice.

Your explanation does raise a concern though. For a while I hesitated using the Heisig method because I didn't want to "learn" the wrong meanings. You're probably right about the "figurative" use of upright as the keyword, but he actually uses the memory trick for this kanji of imagining a magician using his wand (the top part) to make shellfish walk around upright on their two little feet (bottom part).

I'd given up learning Kanji, then decided to just learn the English to go with it and then discovered that's Heisig's technique too. This one is near the front because he groups similarly shaped kanji.

Thanks again!

[Bueller_007]

No worries.

貞 shows up for me in the IME kanji list if I type てい (or じょう) and start browsing through. Like I said before, it won't show up if I type ただしい, but that's a useless reading. Mac OS 10.4 here.

[Jackleit]

I would stick with Heisig's book. Although some of the meanings may be off a bit, learning just one meaning and relating it the stories worked very well for me. I'd skip volume's two and three, though. At that point, you're well on your way, and you can dive into more specific meanings and pronunciations in other ways.