I think just to start out with any computer language, the foreign character issue is hot tar on the road to progress. As a beginner, try to do without it for a while.

The following should scare anybody. ASCII admittedly is only a 7-bit character set (0 to 127), originally defined for the American dialect. The basic 8-bit extension (128 to 255) is considered to be the international standard ISO 8859-1.

This standard is adulterated with other ISO sets for other languages and many proprietary 8-bit sets. The Microsoft set is different than IBM and so on.

The ISO standard that does not define characters 0-31 and 127-159. The Microsoft 8-bit characters set is close but is not the same as ISO 8859-1 which explains the difference between wxWindows (Unix) and Windows.

There is detailed information at:
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/chars.html

All in all an imperfect computer world, unicode with up to 64,000 characters should ultimately come to the rescue.