How are phonebooks in countries like China and Japan organised? Even if their symbol set is ordered, wouldn’t it be kind of hard to remember it?
In Japan, for every name there is an official pronunciation expressed by phonetic characters. When you fill out a form of any kind, you are usually asked to provide the pronunciation as well. Phone books are simply organized in phonetic order. The phonetic character set consists of 50 characters which may sound like a lot, but each one is syllabic and the characters are neatly organized into a matrix of 10 consonants and 5 vowels, so it’s very simple to remember. (Actually it’s slightly more complex, but not much.)
Thank you. That one had been eating for some time, and even though I made a similar guess, well I just had to know. 
Not if you’re Japanese. Couldn’t you remember the order of the alphabet if it was twice as long if you had your whole life to practice?
For each hiragana there is an equivelent Katakana, so you really one have to remember one “order”. For example in hiragana the first 5 kana (non-kanji characters) are “ah” “ii” “oo” “eh” and "oh. Since the order and sound are the same in katakana it’s easy to remember.
And as scr4 said the matrix in rows of 5 seperates them into manageable chunks when you are a Japanese student, I could recognize and write both of them very quickly from one 45 minute/day class in under 2 semesters in a highschool setting.
The Kanji is what you should be worrying about.
Well, Chinese characters are ordered by the number of strokes they have so you don’t have to learn any order beyond 1, 2, 3…
Still, looking up a character is a bit of a pain which is why in things like phone books, names are ordered according to the order if pinyin letters. Pinyin is just the standard Latin alphabet I used to type this message, but with a few diacritical marks to indicate tones. Pinyin, of course, is ordered just like in English. The actual names themselves, though, aren&t written in pinyin but with Chinese characters. If you want to see how this works out, I suggest you take a look at [url=“http://cn.dir.yahoo.com/Entertainment/Actors_and_Actresses/Actresses/pg_2.html”]this page*. This is a Yahoo! China listing for actresses. You probably can’t read what written there but run your mouse over the links and look at the url on your status bar. You’ll see that the names go from C to L (on that page) according to the order you know.
Aaargh! Screwed up the coding. Here’s the fixed link.