Moving to Unicode - Questions about how it works

I am tasked with preparing us for Unicode for a variety of character sets, including Chinese, Russian, and Korean.
One of the things I'm focusing on is SSIS. I tested a simple search and it works great. But now I am asking questions about these languages.

• Can you beat kanji?
• How does sorting work if the column contains Russian and Japanese?
• Hebrew and Arabic are both written from right to left, however, when I do substring for the first character in Arabic, I get the leftmost, but Hebrew gives me the rightmost.
• How about character sets? If I use a French keyboard and write a name, but another time I use the same letters on a Russian keyboard, will the search find a connection?
  

Any advice would be appreciated.