My friend has told me it's still easier to find a specific chinese character by recognition rather than pinyin or other romanized input methods.
That's not necessarily true.
The typical day to day typing could be easily done easily by using a phonetic input system, be it Hanyu Pinyin (mainland China & Singapore) or Zhuyin Fuhao (Taiwan), or some variation of Cantonese phonetic input (Hong Kong).
One misconception many people have is that each character is its own "word", which is simply not true. Each character does indeed have its own meaning but most modern Chinese words are formed with two or more characters. For example, highway is 高速公路 gaosu gonglu, literally meaning "high-speed public-road", if you break up those four characters, the word loses its meaning. So if I were to input that word in Chinese on a computer, all I have to do is type "gaosugonglu" and the computer would choose those four corresponding characters. See how easy it can be?
Japanese is syllable based, every japanese character can be represented by 1, 2, or 3 letter combinations. Chinese on the other hand is ideogram based and terribly hard to represent with 26 letters, especially when there can be 10 different ways to pronounce a single sound in chinese!!
That's not quite true.
Japanese Hiragana and Katakana are syllabic and phonetic, but a good amount of Japanese text is still in Kanji, which is simply Chinese character. In fact, the word Kanji 漢字 itself literally means "Han characters", Han being the largest Chinese ethnic group.
Chinese characters, Hanzi/Kanji, are not all ideograms either. Majority of modern Chinese characters are actually
semanto-phonetic.
Also, there is absolutely nothing hard about representing spoken Chinese with 26 letters and there are NOT "10 different ways to pronounce a single sound in Chinese"...
Hanyu Pinyin and
Zhuyin Fuhao represents spoken Mandarin Chinese perfectly with phonetic letters, the former with Roman letters, the latter with "simplified Chinese characters" not dissimilar to Japanese Hiragana and Katakana.