On western keyboards, Japanese is typed using an input method. Basically, you spell the words using a phonetic convention and the computer guesses what sinograp

On western keyboards, Japanese is typed using an input method. Basically, you spell the words using a phonetic convention and the computer guesses what sinograph you meant: you type zitensha, press space, and it hopefully becomes 自転車 (bicycle). Because each of zi, ten, and sha could be the reading of any of multiple characters the computer might guess wrongly. It works pretty much all the time, though. There are also Japanese keyboard layouts featuring all the 51 syllables (besides the latin alphabet). You just type the syllables, there's no phonetic convention, just the guessing game. I don't know how it works for Chinese, though. It's probably the same, I guess. I know that on Mac OS X one can draw the characters with the finger on the touchpad.