My impression is that applications for Pinyin text input have advanced to a level where they can be used really quickly, often faster than English. They also al

My impression is that applications for Pinyin text input have advanced to a level where they can be used really quickly, often faster than English. They also allow for fuzzy input and dialect-related mistakes. It's more troubling for older people who haven't studied or have forgotten about Pinyin and need to resort to shape-based methods. Hong Kongers obviously don't use Pinyin, and I think most are quite a bit slower than Mainlanders in typing characters. Some write in components, others draw the full characters, which is slowed down by the fact that HK uses traditional characters. (As for Taiwan, I think shape-based input methods are also most common, and I would be surprised if Taiwanese were faster than Mainlanders in typing characters. But I'm not that familiar with input methods in Taiwan.)