Paula
Have a look at www.chinesecomputing.com
Are you a student of one of these languages? Take a look at a website from one of the countries, without character-reading software running, and you will see that each character is represented by two ASCII characters - usually obscure things like ^ or ` and others that are not on the qwerty keyboard at all.
My understanding is this: order of database entry is not based on any phonetic system, nor on any arrangement of radicals or character components, but on a standard (for Chinese, usually one of Big-5 or GB (Guo-Biao)) which maps each character on to an arbitrary pair of ASCII characters. With the advent of the Unicode standard, a one-to-one mapping is also now possible, but implementations are rare.
I'm not an expert: perhaps there's one around who would care to add their comments?
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