I don’t understand this for learning Japanese, can someone help?

There is a lot of confusion, even between japanese people, about the spelling of people's names in kanji. sometimes there needs to be a clarification, for example (poor example) 'nice to meet you my name is yamada.' and they may be like 'wuut? how do you write your name?' so they write it on a piece of paper for them. So Kanji is made up of little characters called radicals. The amount of radicals in a kanji varies and as you learn, you will find that the more radicals a kanji has, the harder it is to differentiate it between other kanji. For example, 週 and 遅 look very very similar in terms of their radicals, but they have totally different meanings.

Ugh...I'm learning Japanese too, and it's HARD.

Start with Hiragana - these are a series of symbols which represent sounds like "ro" or "na" or "shi." There are ~45 basic hiragana, and like 100 "extra" hiragana, where an extra mark or two changes the sound (say from "ka" to "ga"). So that's like 150 hiragana overall.

You can technically spell any word with hiragana. Foreign words are usually spelled with katakana, however.

Katakana are very similar to hiragana. 1 hiragana = 1 katakana. So you can learn katakana next. Often words will be spelled using BOTH katakana and hiragana, so, yeah. Not simple.

Kanji is the most complex. There are thousands of kanji. Some of them represent sounds, exactly like hiragana. Most of the represent longer strings (like words). I only know a handful of kanji. I just started learning so I'm still working on katakana myself.

My goal is more to be able to speak with my wife's family, not so much to be able to read, so I'm not going to work too hard to learn kanji. I'm going to learn the hiragana / katakana and then focus on the sound of words (kanji) rather than how they look on paper.

The Japanese have multiple alphabets. Around 2000 years ago they started using kanji (Chinese script) for formal trade agreements between the two countries, and this persisted as the official court and trading language. Later, they developed hiragana and katakana, which are syllabic. Hiragana are used for native Japanese words, katakana for imported words. For example, Coca-Cola will always be spelled out in katakana, not hiragana. The advantage of kanji is that an entire word, like "moon", can be expressed in one character instead of several. It takes time to learn when to use which of the alphabets. I memorized the hiragana and katakana symbols as well as a few hundred kanji, but was still totally lost when I lived in Japan. It took a while to learn the most meaningful kanji for everyday life, as opposed to what you see in textbooks.

Japanese is one of the most difficult languages to learn.

There are three written languages, Kanji (the symbols adopted from China), Hiragana (the Japanese written language), and Katakana (the phonetic spelling of foreign words). There's also Romanji, the Romanized phonetic spellings. When someone explains their name it's basically the same as someone in the US saying "Tammi with an I", her name could be spelled using the Hiragana, but the preferred method is the Kanji for moon.

Turning Japanese, I'm think I'm turning Japanese, I REALLY THINK SO!