ELI5, The Japanese Writing System
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There’s three systems that are in normal use:
Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji. Hiragana and katakana are phonetic, meaning the characters represent sounds instead of entire words. Kanji are symbols borrowed from Chinese.
You can write any sentence entirely in hiragana, for example
わたしははんばあがあをたべました (this means: I ate a hamburger).
But for certain words, it’s more common to write them in the other systems. Katakana, for instance, is usually used to write words that were borrowed from other languages(so in our example sentence, hamburger would be written ハンバーガー instead of はんばあがあ). And certain words are written in kanji if they have one. In our example, I is written わたし in hiragana and 私 in Kanji. And ate is たべました in hiragana and 食べました in kanji. In that example, most of the word is still written in hiragana. This is common for verbs, where you will write the first part in kanji and use hiragana to describe how it’s conjugated. So past tense is 食べました and present tense is 食べます.
So the better way to write the sentence is
私はハンバーガーを食べました
There’s a lot more you can go into, but that’s the basic idea. Katakana is loan words, kanji is certain words that happen to have a shorter Chinese symbol and everything else is hiragana.
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