&gt; &quot;Using pinyin as you suggest is actually hopelessly slow&quot;<p>Everyone I&#x27;ve encountered in China seems to do it just fine. It is only hopelessly slow if you type one character at a time.<p>&gt; &quot;adopting an input method based on the character radical composition or handwriting recognition is much faster&quot;<p>What character radical input method are you talking about? I can&#x27;t imagine any input method using radical composition being faster, it would be comparable to using Latin roots to type out English words; there are just too many to be practical. You can actually do this on Pleco, but it takes forever, even longer than typing one character at a time in pinyin.<p>Handwriting could work assuming you can handwrite Chinese quickly (I would be deathly slow as I can&#x27;t read a typical handwritten cursive note, much less write one). I think handwriting recognition is already pretty good, people just use pinyin because it&#x27;s the easiest.