You're on the right track. Individual words in Japanese can be represented in three ways: 1) Pure hiragana 2) Pure Kanji 3) A mixture of Kanji + hiragana #3 c

You're on the right track. Individual words in Japanese can be represented in three ways: 1) Pure hiragana 2) Pure Kanji 3) A mixture of Kanji + hiragana #3 comes into picture especially when conjugating verbs. As the base verb is written in Kanji but the various forms are tacked on in hiragana. The important bit : The kanji symbol essentially just compresses the hiragana into a symbol, but all words that contain kanji can be uncompressed back to hiragana. Japanese is definitely hard to learn, but it is not hard to pronounce. The hardness comes from the fact that the Kanji can have multiple 'readings' depending on the context. Source: Studying/struggling with Japanese for the last 5 years.