how do keyboards work in pictographic languages (Chinese & Japanese in particular)?

I'm no expert on Chinese but I did study Japanese for a while (thanks to a bilingual girlfriend). The Japanese words are combinations of short, sharp syllables. All Japanese children learn these syllables from an early age (as Western children do with the alphabet) so as to be familiar with the rhythm of the language. Only in later years do they progress to the difficult job of learning kanji and even Kanata. These phonetic sounds have an English equivalent name called Romaji

The syllabic sounds take the form similar to our vowel sounds so you would have 'words' such as ba, be , bi, bo, bu and kah, keh, kih, koh, kuh.

A combination of key strokes would be used for each of these sounds to produce the Romaji word and then finished with an escape character. The computer translates this word and the character appears as Kanji on the computer screen. It obviously requires the indiginous user to learn the characters of a Western keyboard but it does seem to be the simplest method at the moment.

I can only presume that the Chinese system is quite similar.