I actually use a penpower tablet to input/write in the characters. It’s a bit slower than writing but then I don’t have to pick the characters from the list. (Chinese has an obscene number of homonyms, as all characters are essentially monosyllabic).
http://www.taiwan.com.au/Soccul/Language/Features/style01.jpg
And we don’t have slanted “i“s… actually, it’s just that we put a short line in mandarin pinyin over the main vowel of the word to indicate what tone it is (there are four: a flat line, a rising line, a squiggle ‘u’, and a line slanting down)