I’m still new at japanese, only 4 months into it. I started an anki deck for mining sentences from anime and I found myself using my pre-existing knowledge of chinese as a crutch. I would guess the meaning of a word based on the kanji, instead of actually memorizing it. I’m also really bad at learning the japanese pronunciation of the kanji, it takes me many tries. It’s like it’s competing with the chinese pronunciation in my head.
On the flip side, when I practice reading native material, I read much faster if there is kanji compared to hiragana.