Every planet in your chart is associated with a different domain of experience. Once you know what each one covers, reading a chart becomes a matter of combining domain plus sign plus house rather than memorising anything new.
Here is the quick reference.
The personal planets
These move fastest and are read as closest to daily personality.
Sun — core identity, the direction you are growing toward.
Moon — emotional life, what you need to feel secure.
Mercury — thinking and communication style.
Venus — what you value, what you find attractive.
Mars — drive, assertion, how you handle conflict.
The social planets
Slower moving, associated with how you relate to structures larger than yourself.
Jupiter — expansion, growth, where you tend to overextend or find opportunity.
Saturn — structure, discipline, the areas where you learn through restriction.
The outer planets
These move so slowly that people born within a few years of each other share the same sign placement. They are read as generational influences rather than personal ones — the house they occupy in your specific chart matters more than the sign.
Uranus — disruption, individuality, sudden change.
Neptune — imagination, dissolution of boundaries, idealism.
Pluto — transformation, power, what gets rebuilt from the ground up.
Putting it together
A placement is read as domain, expressed through sign, active in a house. Venus (what you value) in a practical sign (expressed cautiously) in the house of career (in your working life) reads as a fairly coherent sentence once you have the pieces.
If you want the fuller picture beyond individual planets, this walkthrough of what a birth chart actually says about you covers how planets, signs and houses combine.
The fastest way to make this concrete is to look at your own free birth chart calculator results and work through each planet one at a time using this list. Ten placements, ten short sentences, and the chart stops looking like a wall of symbols.