There are only 8 strokes used to write Chinese characters (see Zhongwen.com). I think that the mention of 36 strokes in the article refers to bopomofo, a phonetic syllabary used only in Taiwan. Taiwanese phones use this system to write Chinese characters, in the same way that mainland and Hong Kong phones use pinyin.

However, stroke order can be used to write characters as well, on all Chinese phones. Only 5 are used - heng (horizontal), shu (vertical), pie (diagonal), dian (a dot), and gou (a hook on the end of a stroke). The predictive ability of the input system is very efficient. Options for characters are listed according to how common they are, and once one is selected, a list of the most likely characters to follow it appears. In this way, multi-character words and even whole phrases can be typed with just a few button-pushes. It is possible to write Chinese text messages fairly quickly in this way, even for us stupid laowai!

Maybe 5 years ago they had phones that did this, but nowadays, most people have touchscreen phones where they can just write out the characters by hand. I'm not saying Chinese cell phone technology is more modern, just that new gadgets are more quickly adopted.

i recently got back from china after living there, near shenzhen, for a year and a half, and didn't see anyone writing characters on touchscreen phones . . .

but to the original article, where the author poses two difficulties when inputting characters, I have a dispute with the first. the author describes the difficulty: many characters have identical pinyin spellings--this is really not a problem- anyone who knows pinyin has had enough education to be able to recognize the characters. uneducated chinese have no idea how to pronounce words written in pinyin.

I agree, I know that touchscreen phones are available but you don't see many people using them, even in Hong Kong.

A lot of my Hong Kong friends text using Roman letters, because it is faster. There's a popular hybrid SMS language that uses a combine of Chinese characters and the Roman alphabet to express things in phonetic shorthand.

For instance, the phrase "a little bit" might be expressed using the Chinese character for "one" (a single horizontal slash), followed by the letter "D", which sounds like the spoken words "Yat di".

This SMS shorthand also seems to be prevalent on Chinese language blogs.

Anyway, Rory is right--even though my Chinese writing skills are bad, I have no problem texting using the five-key stroke system. Whoever invented that predictive text program is a genius.