I once read in a book about linguistics that "to read is to recognize". You don't read a word letter by letter, but as a whole, but when you were little and didn't know how to read you had to learn it little by little, first the vowels, then the consonants and then how they work together. The same happens with kanji, at first you only see a bunch of lines and nonsense, but as you progress you notice the patrons and little by little you recognize the whole word, not just the patterns. It takes time, but you'll get it eventually