It looks like you need to delve deeper into the Chinese writing system. It is nothing mystical or complex ordinary Western people cannot learn, it just takes time and some dedication. 

I suppose you have a textbook or similar material that is divided into lessons with each lesson introducing a handful of characters and a number of expressions, if not you should get one. I know it is very boring in the beginning to read such sterile sentences like "This is my father./Here is a book.", etc., but that's the way it is, you need to lay the basics of vocabulary, characters and expressions and some grammar. 

Chinese is unlike any Indo-European language (including those you listed) it has it's own peculiarities, but words are still words in any language, they need to be memorized and practiced. That requires time and patience. 

While pinyin is a necessary help to all those who learn Chinese (and to Chinese themselves), it is not something you should rely to much on. Generally, you should avoid using textbooks that give pinyin transcription side-by-side to the Chinese script, because the more familiar Latin script will distract you more rather than help you. Pinyin should be given in the vocabulary section of every lesson, but not in the lessons reader part. I know of people who would refuse reading a Chinese script only text, because after a few lessons they were relying so much on reading the pinyin transcripts, that they were simply unable to read the proper characters. 

You need to build up some vocabulary, learn the words and their characters, their pronunciation and practice them. Reading something in Chinese simply requires you to be able to recognize the words, not only the characters, as you wrote in your question, you need to be able to "parse" a text to tell where each word begins and ends. Sometimes – with new expressions and terms popping up in the media everyday – it's not easy, even for advanced speakers. 

It's a good thing to write characters by hand from the very beginning to memorize them. However, it's not necessary, if you find it a burden. If you think this requires too much effort, you can stick with reading only in the beginning and start writing what you have learnt later when you are more familiar with basic concepts.

Reading your last paragraph, I see that you are highly motivated to learn Chinese. But you should not start with reading to difficult texts, it's a waste of time looking up the vocab character by character and idling half an hour over a single sentence. I have done that, I admit, I thought I would be able to read Chinese comics after I figured out how to look up a character in a dictionary. I wasted hours and hours for this nonsense. Stick with your text book texts, do the exercises, memorize the vocab and you will make progress.