Full-text searches are supported for MyISAM tables only. Full-text searches can be used with multi-byte character sets. The exception is that for Unicode, the UTF-8 character set can be used, but not the ucs2 character set. Ideographic languages such as Chinese and Japanese do not have word delimiters. Therefore, the FULLTEXT parser cannot determine where words begin and end in these and other such languages. Although the use of multiple character sets within a single table is supported, all columns in a FULLTEXT index must use the same character set and collation. From http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/fulltext-restrictions.html