So most of the vocabulary I’m learning is through WaniKani and of course I learn it using kanji. I will often learn a new word and subconsciously tie its meaning to the kanji image. I think my brain already knows the meaning of the word based on the characters before I even formulate the pronunciation in my head. Recently I was having a conversation in Japanese and heard words that I had learned and technically knew, but without seeing the kanji I couldn’t immediately make the connection. Has anyone else run into this struggle and do you have any advice? My guess is to just get more speaking and listening practice.
I’d say, it’s not like learning kanji inhibits speaking, it’s just that, as you’ve said yourself
There are many aspects to language learning – reading, writing (which can be subdivided into literal writing by hand and typing), listening, speaking, grammar…
Each of them requires separate studying…
Granted, they are not all equally important – grammar is essential, but other aspects depend on your goals. For example, I pretty much gave up on handwriting and concentrate on reading, though I also practice listening and typing, both of which I should do more…
Btw, here’s a good resource for listening practice:
Anyway, best of luck with your studies! 
If anything, kanji is a big aid in learning vocabulary, especially the kind of jukugo that could be any number of things. I suffer from this too but it’s just practice and developing a sense of what words are going to pop up when the conversation reaches such-and-such topic. Still, I’m pretty mystified as to how native speakers are supposed to follow things like the technobabble bits in retro sci-fi anime without subtitles, especially since some of the compounds are kind of made up.
trunklayer always gives such thoughtful and helpful advice 
Thanks for your insights! I do understand what you mean. I really feel this with Japanese though because I have studied French and Italian. These languages are obviously much closer to English but there are still words that are completely foreign. At school I would have to drill them into my head using vocabulary lists but this actually worked. I just had to learn the word in one way and then I knew it in different use contexts, i.e. speaking, listening, writing. With Japanese, it’s like you have to really learn the word several times. The funny thing as that kanji being a foreign concept, you would expect that to be the difficult part, but I find myself learning the kanji with a word and then struggling to use it/understand it in spoken language. I will keep working on listening and speaking for sure, I even feel speaking helps me learn a lot more.
Thanks for the Podcast!
I totally agree that kanji is an aid when learning to read. Humans are certainly very visual so the picture helps a lot to associate a word with a meaning. The problem I am stressing is that since I end up associating the meaning not just with the pronunciation but with the kanji image which I do not have when listening, it becomes harder to understand the words immediately from spoken language. It’s like if I were learning french and when reading there is always a little hint above each word to help me understand its meaning. When I listen, I don’t have the hint anymore. You have to almost learn the word twice, once focusing on kanji and once focusing on the phonetic pronunciation.
Add kaniwani to your rotation. I try to give it a day a week.
To learn efficiently you can do a mostly all in one with mining sentences as soon as possible and then you read out loud. A service like jpdb that have configurable “always on” audio on at least the mined word this let you leak the word from reading practice into listening most of the time.
Phagocyting one of my earlier post:
As early as stage two you can have non dedicated listening / shadowing practice which help a lot cement the leaned vocab and kanji.
Becoming capable of recognition of a Kanji combination is different from being capable of recalling a certain word. They are two different skills, with recall being the harder of the two.
What’s that?
Kaniwani is basically the inverse of Wanikani (you can use the API binding to combine them, so words unlock automatically).
It allows you to train recalling the word without seeing the kanji first.
Straight from their about. It really is a great tool companion to wk that solves OP’s issue. “KaniWani (KW) is a companion website to WaniKani (WK), an SRS tool for kanji and vocabulary memorization. We felt that WK helped a lot with being able to recognize and read Japanese, but didn’t help enough when trying to recall or reproduce words without the visual cue of seeing kanji. KW attempts to bridge that gap by quizzing you from English to Japanese using your WK vocabulary, forcing you to do the opposite of what you are used to.”