> I suspect that for people learning languages with a more complex script (chinese comes to mind) modern technology make things a lot easier as well, I remember reading that looking up words in a Chinese dictionary could be quite complicated for a beginner.
It's honestly not that bad once you learn a little about recognizing the radicals [0] that make up each character. The way these dictionaries work, at least for Japanese, is that you first lookup the main radical, and then you just need the stroke count [1] of the second component. These radicals/components are reused often so once you learn how to write a few of them you can get decent at counting the strokes (a dictionary I perused actually recommends breaking the non-radical part into common components and just summing up their parts to count faster). This narrows it down pretty well and then you just have to visually search for the character.
There are also alternative methods that can be used such as that of Kodansha's Kanji Learner's Dictionary [1], which uses a three-number code, with the first being how the radical and its component are visually oriented, and the other two their respective stroke counts. I've also learned the four corner method, [2] and while it can seem deceptively simple, it's also remarkably unintuitive in what part of the kanji is considered a corner (and also relies on a specific writing of the kanji).
Of course modern technology does make it a tad easier, especially for those who have no clue about things like radicals. The online dictionary Jisho [3] for example lets you search by radicals where you can select each radical—even a sub-component—regardless of position, and it'll just give you a set of kanji containing those radicals, ordered by total stroke count. You can also draw the kanji, but in my experience this works very sub-optimally, and still depends on using the right number of the ever-important stroke count. I own a denshi jisho [4] which lets you draw the kanji with a stylus, and that works a lot better.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_(Chinese_characters)
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodansha_Kanji_Learner%27s_Dic...
[2]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four-Corner_Method
[3]: https://jisho.org/
[4]: Literally "electronic dictionary", they're veritable beasts, and contain not only multiple Japanese dictionaries, they also have specialized dictionaries (like business), J-E and E-J dictionaries, pronunciation dictionaries with audio, encyclopedias, other multilingual phrasebooks, practice for the TOEIC, and so many more that are too numerous to list.