A schematic is not a picture of a circuit. It is a map of connections, and it deliberately throws away everything about physical placement to make the connections easier to read. Two components drawn far apart may sit touching on the real board. Once you stop expecting the drawing to look like the object, schematics get much easier.
The vocabulary is small
A dozen symbols cover most hobby circuits: resistor, capacitor, diode, LED, transistor, switch, battery, ground, and a handful of IC rectangles. You do not memorize them so much as meet them repeatedly until they read like letters.
Nets and the grammar of wires
Every line is a net: a set of points that are electrically the same. A dot where lines cross means connected; no dot means the wires just pass each other in the drawing. Ground symbols scattered around the page are all the same net, drawn separately to avoid a spiderweb of lines. When a schematic seems confusing, tracing one net at a time with a finger or a highlighter almost always untangles it.
Read it in the right order
Power flows top to bottom and signals flow left to right in most well-drawn schematics. Find the supply first, then the ground, then follow the signal path. Ask what each stage does to the signal before worrying about component values: structure first, numbers second.