Surely an explicitly tonal alphabet is preferable to a language with implicit tone (e.g. English). I can only imagine that learning English's implicit tone curves pose a challenge to speakers of Asian languages.

(Esperanto is intended to be perfectly understandable without tonal inflection, through the use of particles such as "ĉu" and "ja", though in practice Westerners universally tonally inflect their speech because they don't know otherwise.)

What? Who has a tonal alphabet? Why would annotating tone in a non tonal language be helpful?

What's wrong with Chinese input using a decent IME actually?

I wish I could say that people are lazy and Chinese is fine if only one can employ the right tools for it, but the thing is, the Chinese writing, through its inherent nature, imposes a heavy cognitive load on its users. In this regard it is comparable to English, which does the same thing through its vocabulary. Many are criticizing the inflections in a given inflected language but that is actually a trick to lessen/optimize the language's vocabulary. The language and writing are communication infrastructure. The less we're paying for using those and the less they are getting in your way - the better.

It's much slower than a skilled alphabetical typist can do. In Japanese, and I assume also in Chinese, there is a faster system used by people who do jobs that require fast typing, but it's very complicated and most people do not learn it.

What is that Japanese system?

For Chinese there's the Wubi method [1], which assigns each radical component of a character to a key, by typing the right combination of keys for some of the components, individual strokes and disambiguation keys, any Chinese character can be almost uniquely identified (some typographic variants have identical representations).

I'm currently trying to learn it, because I hate scrolling through long lists of homophones to find some rarer character; but I have not yet achieved the level where I can just freely type out anything without looking up its key sequence.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wubi_method

Sorry, it's been a while since I read about it and I'm having trouble finding the info again. I imagine it's similar to the stroke-based Chinese entry systems because each character would then have an unambiguous key sequence, obviating the need to keep checking the screen and selecting words from the menu.

e: Actually I found some info here: https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%BC%A2%E5%AD%97%E7%9B%B4%E6...

It looks like some systems are T-Code, TUT-code, etc.