system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: How do you "look up" words in languages that do not use the Latin alphabet? Chinese and Japanese do not have an "alphabetical order" so how does one look up a meaning of a word or character?
gpt
The Japanese and Chinese go by stroke order. Every kanji has what's called a "radical." Some kanji are just the radicals themselves. In the beginning of a typical Japanese dictionary, there should be a big chart of all the radicals, and that is the order you'll find them in.

The radicals and kanji are ordered by how many strokes it takes to write them. The very first radical, 一, has obviously only one stroke in it. Every kanji that branches itself from it will show up in the dictionary under it, based on how many strokes it takes to write each one *after* the radical.

A radical such as 力 may be easier to see, as you might see a kanji with 力 squished in to one side. 動 is an example of a kanji whose radical is 力. You'd find it under 力+9, as it takes 9 extra strokes to write it after writing the two-stroke radical in it.

Edit: Also in Japanese, words that don't have a kanji simply use hiragana (the basic syllabary) and katakana (same sounds, different writing; used for foreign words). This has its own little order to it.  
a, i, u, e, and o （あ、い、う、え、お） are the vowel sounds, which begin the syllabary, and n（ん） is a standalone sound as well. Then you have <ka, ki, ku, ke, ko>, then <ga, gi, gu, ge, go>, then <sa, shi, su, se, so>. That's essentially just something you'd have to memorize. Another interesting bit is that you have pure and impure sounds. Pure sounds are softer-sounding (sounds with k or s, for example), and impure sounds are their harder-sounding counterparts (g and z, for the two mentioned as pure). Some syllable sets have one impure counterpart, others have none. The only syllable set with two impure sounds is the "h" set, whose impure sounds are "b" and "p."