Well, i'm not saying that is how it is read in practice, because obviously that would be much too slow to be practical. Nevertheless the structure and meaning i

Well, i'm not saying that is how it is read in practice, because obviously that would be much too slow to be practical. Nevertheless the structure and meaning is there, and for beginners it helps a lot to memorize complex kanji as combinations of radicals instead of a giant blob of context-free lines, until subconscious pattern recognition has a big enough body of data to work and start matching with. Obviously there is also a difference in how japanese children and foreigners learn the language, since children in japan are, since birth, surrounded by kanji and very often see them in context with their meaning, while for foreigners they're completely new and some kind of mental context needs to be established in the first place.