What's this Double Byte stuff?

Chinese, Japanese and Korean are all double-byte languages. English, by contrast, is a single-byte language. English is an alphabetic language. Each letter in the English alphabet occupies a single byte in computer memory. The CJK languages are syllabic languages. And each syllable occupies two bytes in computer memory. There is no such thing as a single letter in the CJK languages. No e, no j, no z. The smallest part of a CJK language would be, say, fa - a syllable. The word Tokyo, for instance, has five letters in English and occupies five bytes in computer memory. As it is written in Japanese, however, it is made up of two syllables (tou kyou) and occupies four bytes in computer memory - two bytes for each syllable.