Simon living and studying in japan for a couple of years. I can tell you this is not how most people write The Chinese and Japanes keyboard is slightly different. We spell out the sound of the word we want. The input is Hiragana and Katakana, then the Operating System will produce a list of words to choose from (Since Chinese and Japnese words sometimes have multiple meanings this is a must) You can equate it with using intuitive text on celphones. But a little different Base on the sound, the Operating systems guess what word you want and u select it from the list. It isn't very hard once u get use to it. Most Chinese and Japanese know about 6,000 to 8,000 thousand characters. Quite a few more than then english alphabet.