Learning to type in Chinese is an important part of any Chinese learner’s to do list. Although of course it takes a long time to get round Chinese grammar and expression, there are a couple of reasons why it is good to learn to type in Chinese early on:

1) By using the Pinyin to enter characters or words, you will become more familiar with recognising characters according to their Pinyin pronunciation, and associating pronunciations with characters

2) If you can type characters or words, you can input them into dictionary software, to get quick definitions of words you hear, which is much faster than using a paper dictionary.