Do the chinese still use the multitude of symbols for their writing?

If you learn some Chinese, you may have a better understanding.
Actually, Chinese is not a difficult language. Many English-speaking Chinese learners have found the truth that Chinese is not that difficult to learn.

The Chinese have tried many times to replace the characters with alphabet or romanized system, but failed for many reasons.
One major reason is that there are many Chinese words with the same sounds and tones (pitches)

On the other hand, people in China found many simple ways to input Chinese on computers, handheld, celphones. They can easily type more than 80 characters a minute. If you travel in China and do some observation, you would be amazed that the Chinese like to send text message (in Chinese characters) with their celphones so much. The celphone companies make so much money just because of the high usage of text message instead of the voice mail. (It is the opposite in the US.)

You would be also amazed that the Chinese or Japanese (who also likes using Chinese characters, which they call Kanji. see http://www.answers.com/kanji and http://www.answers.com/hanji ) are so advanced in technology for their daily life when you look at their celphones, home video systems, etc. ( VCD was already used so long ago when most of the US consumers didn't even know what it is.)

Just because of the advanced computer technology, Chinese and other character using countries have overcome the difficulty with the pictogram characters.

One of the best system used by the Chinese is Pinyin, which turns the Chinese sounds into alphabets. With Pinyin input method, they can type the long string of Chinese characters for "中華人民共和國(the peoples republic of China)" with only a few key stokes ( much fewer than English)
More on Pinyin at http://www.answers.com/pinyin or
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20060821042248AA2Y0bc

With Pinyin introduced into Chinese, the Chinese people use lots of alphabet shorthands in IM. e.g. "MM" for sister or girl
88 for Byebye, etc.

In scientific institution they needed to take notes quite speedy. Becoming a surgeon isn't that convenient now, The pace in their writing messep up their handwriting And they do not care approximately it after fitting a surgeon.

The Chinese still uses characters. They have been using it for thousands of years, and will continue to use them. There are a number of radicals (what you could call parts of a charcter, some are whole charcters in themsevles) which allows the creation of a new character. It may or may not become a common place character. As well, many words are transliterated into Chinese from another lanuage - they will use combination of common characters that approximate the sound of the word, so it is not nessicary to have a simplier language.

yes