trying to read...

I just invested an hour of work to look up some characters that were written on a form. Looking up characters doesn't meet to understand their meaning, it only means looking them up in a dictionary. Usually I will write the pronunciation next to the character so I can find it easily again later.
Looking up characters has become faster with modern dictionaries which offer better indexes. With a dictionary like Zhongwen Zipu it also becomes faster when you know more other characters, because then you can navigate directly to a similar character which is (hopefully) listed close to the one you are looking for. (In obivious cases such as 厅 and 听 this almost always works, but those cases are only few...)
In short, half an hour for looking up a couple characters (using several dictionaries, because I just didn't know where to look anymore in the first one) is still quite fast. However, now that I have all the characters, with many meanings provided for each, but I still can't put it quite together! I found the characters, but they just don't make sense...
While it is normal that two characters who are put together to form a third one don't really contribute much to that characters meaning, it is sadly often also the case that even two characters standing side-by-side to form a word, do not contribute that much to the meaning.
I have noticed quite early when I came here that it is actually more the sound makes the meaning by pointing to a word that is used in speech. Indeed, it is not hard to read Chinese text if you know all the (spoken) words that occur in the text, even if you don't know all the characters! Some character pronunciations can be guessed from the character's similarity with know characters and from the pronunciation of the characters in context. (For example 厅 and 听 above are both pronounced the same.)
Trying to read something whose words and their use you don't know beforehand is indeed very hard!