Further, China’s most revered book of poems is also its oldest (ca. 8th century BCE), and the poems were and are centrally concerned with sounds and sound patterns (and Confucius insisted his students study it). Moreover, far and away the best means of memorizing texts or parts of them is by knowing how to pronounce the graphs in sequential order. Indeed, many works in the canon were consciously rhymed at times during their composition to aid memorization as a philosophical exercise (we will have more to say on this theme in §4.2). On the other hand, once you know that “to lie” is depicted as “the words of a witch” you will likely not forget it. On the one hand again, over 90% of the characters have a phonetic element in them. But on the other, the Chinese themselves used semantics and not phonetics for the construction of their dictionary classification system, as Hansen noted.