I am a native English speaker and a second language Mandarin speaker who learned at early adult age.
I personally consider typing English and Mandarin to be very different. There are linguistic, psychological, and cultural issues at play.
Firstly, the dominant Chinese input system is phonetic (pinyin), which perhaps implies some kind of different mental state when typing.
Secondly, it is the case for adult learners like me but also reportedly for many native speakers that precise Chinese characters are easy to forget. People have visual memories of 3-10,000 characters, but perhaps can write confidently as little as half of them from memory. The phonetic input system presents a context-based suggested intent shortlist and the user is requested to select the character they intended.
Sometimes, in more extreme cases, particularly for native speakers with heavy accents or new second language speakers, users may be unsure which character to select or may even input an incorrect but close phoneme, scan for visual recognition of the correct character, fail to find it, then type a different phoneme.
Frequently, typing Chinese is the only major creative interaction that Mandarin speakers have with modern Chinese text, since writing is becoming increasingly rare outside of a school or government-form context.
I personally consider typing English and Mandarin to be very different. There are linguistic, psychological, and cultural issues at play.
Firstly, the dominant Chinese input system is phonetic (pinyin), which perhaps implies some kind of different mental state when typing.
Secondly, it is the case for adult learners like me but also reportedly for many native speakers that precise Chinese characters are easy to forget. People have visual memories of 3-10,000 characters, but perhaps can write confidently as little as half of them from memory. The phonetic input system presents a context-based suggested intent shortlist and the user is requested to select the character they intended.
Sometimes, in more extreme cases, particularly for native speakers with heavy accents or new second language speakers, users may be unsure which character to select or may even input an incorrect but close phoneme, scan for visual recognition of the correct character, fail to find it, then type a different phoneme.
Frequently, typing Chinese is the only major creative interaction that Mandarin speakers have with modern Chinese text, since writing is becoming increasingly rare outside of a school or government-form context.