There's nothing to stop you writing a kanji word (be it a compound, adjective or verb) entirely in hiragana - in fact, until you learn all the kanji you need, you won't have much choice.

and are the same word.

If you could read hiragana, you could pronounce - but you might not know what it meant.

On the other hand, when faced with , you might not be able to remember the pronunciation, but you might recognize it as meaning "old"; hiragana tells you how to pronounce something, but kanji gives you a clue to the meaning.

The sentence "Next year I am going to Canada" translates to "rainen watashi wa kanada ni ikimasu". This could be written entirely in kana:






A Japanese, however, would use kanji where possible:







Both are correct and have the same meaning. There is no spoken difference between the two.