Problem inserting german and french characters

[Kenia Glez]

Hello everybody!

I have a database that's supposed to hold data in different laguages, such as english, spanish, hebrew, german and french, but in priciple users may want to store info in any language. The charset I'm using is utf8 and collation utf8-general-ci, so that any character is correctly stored, however I've just found the following problem:
-When I insert any special character of german language it doesn't get stored correctly, for example the ß is represented as ß, however if I update the database, then it's well represented, so that makes me think the problem is just in the insertion. The same happens with the è character of the french language.
Am I using the wrong charset or collation? Which one should I use instead? If this is the problem, then why the update operation works? I would expect it not to, and however it does...
Please, if anyone has any idea and can help me out with this, I will really appreciate it, it's a big issue I've been having and I can't seem to find a solution for it yet.

Thanks in advance,

Kenia