We usually use hiragana, katakana and kanji all of them. Hmm, maybe that person wanted to say about “furigana”. You can see hiragana top of kanji that writing how to read that kanji. For example, if you see “北海道” then you can see small hiragana “ほっかいどう” on the top of those kanji. That is furigana. But it’s not all the time. Because furigana is usually for kids or the kanji that is difficult to read. I’m teaching Japanese then many of my students travel to Japan and all students said they couldn’t read restaurant’s menu because they couldn't read kanji. Even some of students can speak Japanese well.

I think learning kanji is really important especially if you want to travel to Japan or you want to read Japanese books. Of cause you can see furigana or romanization sometimes, but it’s not always.

I guess this website can help you.

This is Japanese new and it use easy Japanese. This one has furigana for all kanji. Also if you want to try harder, you can delete furigana optionally.

I'm a native Japanese . we use Kanji everywhere of course except infants.

So that`s not a waste of time.

As a Japanese language learner I can say that kanji is very important. If you want to read something without knowing kanji it's impossible. I don't know much kanji so of course I can't read books..

And I think that only materials for kids don't include kanji or maybe just some of them. If you want to be able just to speak Japanese you don't have to learn them but of course you won't be able to have a chat and so on in Japanese.

Of course, learning Kanji isn’t a waste of time. I think you can write the sentences by using Hiragana and Katakana. But it’s not a natural and hard to be recognized naturally. And also you can’t find the text without Kanjis usually. So learning Kanji is very useful for you even if it’s really difficult for foreign learners.

One thing, you might find the books which includes Kanji with Hiragana. We call it “hurigana”. Hurigana helps children to read kanji in the sentences during they are in the way of learning Kanjis.

If you have any further questions, ask me freely.

All the best