[kusokurae]

Hey! So in the vast majority of cases, what you're describing for english is more or less the same for these languages -- when I forget a real bastard of a character (usually a less complex one similar to many others), I can sort of mentally picture the shape, but not quite. I get a flash of the shape in my mind, but then it's gone, and I'm in a half-position where I know parts of it, maybe I know it has 广 and something like 多 inside there somewhere (this is purely academic, I'm not referencing a real character here), but I don't know the exact order. Quite often this is where the art of bodging it, scribbling it, or using a variant character comes in handy.

Also, for more fun, Chinese and even rarely Japanese will sometimes use a different character sharing the same pronunciation from a set of characters typically used for just phonetic pronunciation, in the place of the one they've forgotten.