This question is inspired by my experience with Chinese. In character based language, there are quite a few ways to type the characters. I'm really curious what else is out there... is it just Chinese and Japanese that need this, or are there other languages that take advantage of aspects of their orthography to generate clever input methods?
In Chinese at least, these days by far the most popular is pinyin, using a phonetic alphabet and then you select the characters (there are many ways of doing this, including a somewhat popular 9-digit method like the old nokia texting).
Beyond that, there are still a ton of different input methods. It's sort of interesting if you're used to English, because the nature of Chinese characters mean there isn't just one perfect way of inputting them. Pinyin has a great strength: it's phonetic. Everyone can speak more words than they can write, especially true of students. Also, recognizing a character is much easier than writing it. And lastly, these days, all of the pinyin keyboards are very very good at guessing the meaning of phrases... though in my experience, that falls apart if you need to write a lot of rarer characters.
To deal with that problem, there are a number of typing systems that are deterministic, meaning that every character has a keystroke that generates it. These are all generally based on how the character is written, though different systems take that in different directions. Use of these systems varies heavily and depends on what language people are speaking (Mandarin, Cantonese, another dialect) and where they are (Mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan). For mandarin on the mainland (where I am), pinyin really is quite ubiquitous. The shape based systems have a lot going for them, and I hope to learn one (mainly because I hate having to look at the screen when I type), but the learning curve is quite high and most people native and student alike do not bother. Plus there are pinyin systems which, coupled with effective predictive algorithms, can be extremely fast. It is really funny though, as an aside, since most people just use normal pinyin without anything special, they generally type quite slowly. When they see my type in English they are all extremely blown away as I can converse with them, not looking at the screen at all, and type blazing fast. This is not uncommon (especially among programmers and/or people who grew up on computers), but for them with their "pinyin, select phrase, pinyin, select phrase" they just haven't seen anyone type that fast. I look forward to learning 五笔 one day and blowing them away with my Chinese speed too :P
While in english most people just use normal english characters with the QWERTY keyboard layout, I suppose it's worth mentioning that there are a lot of others (DVORAK being the one that has the most traction in my programming circles). These exist mainly to facilitate writing more intelligently than DVORAK, though most of the people I know who use them use them to reduce strain on their hands and wrists from typing.
I guess more specializing are the chording keyboards used by court stenographers and some live close captioners, for example. These are generally based off of a totally different keyboard that correlates a chord of key presses to syllables... and these days, they can be customized a lot. The close captioner for live events at my old job did a Q&A and someone asked what words gave her trouble. She said Trump was actually quite hard! Because it's a series of characters that just isn't convenient to type in her system, but his name was getting said a lot. In the end she programmed her own chord to correspond to it. It's a pretty neat system.
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