Long time ago, when i design the database, i never think of the character set for my database. But recently, i have to work on some non-english language like Chinese and Korean. I found that my database does not store the info correctly. So here is my suggestion:
No matter if you decide to support multiple language or not, when you design your database, you should use UTF-8 as the character set.
If you are using mysql and your database is not not with UTF8 – you should use this query to convert it to UTF8. ALTER TABLE table_name CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci