That's a political hornets' nest that you're poking there. There is Pinyin, the official romanisation of Mandarin Chinese, in which for example "汉语拼音" becomes

That's a political hornets' nest that you're poking there. There is Pinyin, the official romanisation of Mandarin Chinese, in which for example "汉语拼音" becomes "hànyǔ pīnyīn". So, one could write using that. The argument typically is that Chinese has too many homonyms to make that practicable. I'm not sure I buy that, as spoken Mandarin is presumably intellegible, despite those homonyms. There's a lot of info in the informative book The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy by John DeFrancis, and on this website: http://www.pinyin.info http://www.pinyin.info > But surely writing speed must be slower. I've found that that is not the case. While a typical character is more complex than a typical letter, you need fewer of them. At uni, I tested that with a native Chinese speaker and a native German speaker. We chose several random English sentences, they translated them into their respective language, and then we timed how long they took to write them down (by hand, in Chinese, German, English). It was basically the same, no systematic difference. > How do chinese people even type? There are several input systems, some based on pronunciation, some based on the shape or strokes. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_input_methods_for_computers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_input_methods_for_comp... or https://www.hackingchinese.com/chinese-input-methods-a-guide-for-second-language-learners/ https://www.hackingchinese.com/chinese-input-methods-a-guide...