ELI5, The Japanese Writing System
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Japanese has three writing systems that are used at the same time. All of them are based on Chinese in some form. They have pretty specific uses within a certain sentence.
Hiragana is based on phonetic Chinese and mimics the pronunciation of certain Chinese words. It is predominantly used for grammatical terms, but also certain words which are usually more basic or more native. Imagine the sentence: “I have a computer and a dog”. Hiragana would be used for the word “and” because it’s grammar, and “have” because it’s a more basic word. You can recognise Hiragana because it looks really round like ひらがな
Kanji are actual Chinese words that are nearly identical to their Chinese counterparts. It is used predominantly for nouns, adjectives, and verbs. Kanji adjectives and verbs rarely occur as just Kanji and usually need hiragana to give them grammar patterns like tense, however, nouns are just fine on their own as Kanji. In the above sentence, the words “I” and “dog” would be in Kanji. You can recognise Kanji because it is basically just Chinese words and looks complex like 漢字
Katakana is also based on phonetic Chinese (but a different one used by monks) and also mimics Chinese pronunciations. It is used mostly for expressing foreign words. In the above sentence “computer” would be in Katakana. You can recognise Katakana because it looks kinda sharp like カタカナ
This is a really crude explanation but should roughly work
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