Table and column set characters must be installed in a version that supports multi-byte characters, such as UTF8.
You can specify the current character set of the table by doing
mysql> SHOW CREATE TABLE tbl_Name;
It may not show you anything, in which case it uses the default value my.cnf
To change the character set in a table:
mysql> ALTER TABLE tbl_name CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci;
, . .
, , . http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2006/01/turning_mysql_data_in_latin1_t.html
, UTF-8, CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci CREATE TABLE