I don't know how to explain it well, but the solid memory I have of hanzi where hanzi components and sound Together are really strong, is just super useful. I mentioned that in the study update post.
It's useful of course, because when I learn knew hanzi as I read I tend to remember roughly the pronunciation, so when I hear that new word later I can transfer the reading-comprehension ability to listening-comprehension ability eventually. I can sound out words when reading, if it looks familiar but hard to recall, and see if the sound jogs my memory and helps me recall the word.
It's interesting in seeing how this interacts with my japanese kanji understanding. Its hard to estimate how many kanji I know, I'd put the estimate around 100-300, in terms of ACTUALLY knowing a japanese pronunciation of a given kanji if I saw it. With chinese hanzi knowledge affecting recognition though, I can guess the meaning of a large portion of kanji I see when reading, and if I know the hiragana or listening form of a word or can guess from context, then I can guess the kanji's pronunciation in the word. So artifically, I can recognize more kanji than I actually know.
My study routine in japanese has been HEAVILY listening focused, precisely because I lack recognition of MOST words when in hiragana only (with no chinese hanzi near-cognates to rely on if I can't see kanji), and because I need to know the actual Pronunciation of new words I figure out when reading... and if I see kanji and manage to guess a new word without knowing it's pronunciation, that's an issue that's been ongoing. So I hope as I learn more words through listening, that will help me 1. add a pronunciation guess to kanji words I run into when reading, causing less words to be 'picked up only in kanji written form' and 2. I'll develop better understanding of hiragana words. The listening heavy approach has been working very well - although I don't think I would recommend it (if you care about reading skill), unless you ALSO have a lot of kanji meaning recognition already. If I did not have kanji meaning recognition/a lot of decent guesses from hanzi meaning similarities, then I would instead be doing Listening-Reading where I read things and listened to them pronounced at the same time. So, something like the Satori Reader app lessons (which is my next study plan for japanese, after I get through Glossika japanese course and perhaps listen to some audio-only things like an audiobook or audio drama or show with no subtitles... I really want a solid foundation of thousands of common words I know BY listening comprehension, before I go back to tackling kanji pronunciations).
So if you do not either know a lot of kanji meanings from some SRS app study (like anki and mnemonics for kanji or something), or from chinese similar-cognates meaning wise, then I'd recommend pairing listening with reading activities to hear the kanji pronunciations frequently AS you learn the kanji word meanings. The pairing sound with word is what I used to do for my initial japanese study a few years ago (before Chinese), and worked better for me in terms of learning kanji-words than anything else I tried (Heisig did not work for me and mnemonics only helped me with meaning not pronunciation). For Chinese, I also paired sound with reading the words for the first 2000 words I studied (in an SRS app) and that helped tremendously. I think for me personally, I link sounds of words very heavily to the ability to read them... I remember better with a mental pronunciation in my head of a given word. So for japanese, kanji just did NOT stick with me learning only the meaning. They did not stick in my memory until I also learned them with audio of words containing kanji.
Right now, the hanzi knowledge helping kanji meaning-guessing is basically... I see kanji, I hear mentally the chinese hanzi pronunciation that kanji looks like, then guess the meaning of the kanji in context of a sentence. The issue, of course, is I am mentally recalling chinese pronunciation constantly. I linked hanzi visually to the pronunciation, and that attachment is strong. So I need to work on developing a strong link for japanese kanji-containing words to their japanese pronunciation, only that is going to fix the issue.
And that's how I estimate how many kanji I 'actually' know... can I look at ζ₯ζ¬θͺ and actually mentally hear nihongo (japanese pronunciation instead of ri-ben-yu (chinese), I can see η¬γ¨η«γ§γ and know it's inu to neko desu, hearing inu and neko in my head INSTEAD of quan and mao. I can see ι΅γεΏγγΎγγ and mentally hear kagi o wasuremashita instead of wang for εΏ. I can see ε§γγΎγγ and hear mentally hajimemashita instead of 'shi' from ιε§ (chinese - kaishi start). The words I can read in japanese and actually mentally hear the japanese pronunciations, are the kanji I actually know well.
But if I run into something like εε (genin - cause) in japanese, my brain just spits out yuanyin (reason - chinese), and has no idea what the japanese pronunciation is unless I look it up. These are the kinds of words (of which there's tons) that use kanji I am not familiar enough with in japanese, so I think I need a much stronger foundation of listening japanese vocabulary so I'd already know genin means cause from hearing it, then eventually see it in sentences and guess it means genin and Then link that to my memory of the word written in kanji.
