Whenever I read Kanji I get this strange thought in my head: You can’t really read kanji; you’ve just memorized these kanji and how to read them. It’s a strange thought because I don’t know how that would even be different from being able to read kanji, but it makes me feel like a fraud every time.
Does anyone else think this, or feel this way?
I actually had that feeling last week. I was practicing using Drops, which I use to practice reading and recall vocabulary, and sometimes I think exactly what you wrote. (Or that for a lot of them, without the image, I wouldn’t remember.)
I also have it when I see kanji that I know in new/unfamiliar words, and then have trouble finding them in the dictionary because I’m typing it using the wrong reading. So I type out words that I know contain that kanji and delete the ones that aren’t part of the word I’m trying to look up.
And then I think about it this way. How long have I been seriously learning kanji? A year? Two? To learn 2,080 kanji that Japanese schoolchildren take 12 years to learn? And that puts it in perspective: I’m being too tough on myself.
I have had these both “weird” experiences while learning Kanji and being exposed to Japanese:
While the first I can get an idea of why I understand the meaning, the second is still kinda a mystery yet to me. It has probably to do something with the radicals, as I’m starting to focus a bit more on that, but I have no conclusions yet 
I never thought of it that way. Compares to English and Thai (my 2 known languages), I view kanji just like the other alphabets. Just more complicated and there are way more of them. You don’t really think about how you know English alphabets right? You just do.
Learning a language is part understanding and part memorisation anyway, and it takes time. Kanji having different reading can be seen as similar to English words with the same spelling but actually pronounced differently (read present tense vs read past tense). At some points, after lots of exposure/experience, you stop feeling like you are memorising them, but it just came to you.
Japanese being my 3rd language I’m attempting to study is probably why I’m not too hard on myself. With English it look me a long time before I became confident. I’m still definitely making mistakes, but that confidence weirdly enough also came in the form of not giving a crap about making mistakes lol.
i knew this. it wanes with mass exposure. once you consume content that is so interesting that you dont really notice you are reading in japanese its gone.
It’s EXACTLY that. Many kanji that share radicals also share meanings.
Japanese people I know do exactly the same thing. This is definitely not imposter syndrome, it’s just finding a smart solution to a common problem.
I do this all the time. I have known some Japanese with particulaury uncommon names that have to do this in order to get the kanji for their names to show up.
I absolutely had this for a while, until I thought about how children learn to read in English. It’s fine for it to feel like a memory game, but there will come a point where you just read. It’s cliche but my advice is genuinely not to worry about it, and not to beat yourself up for what is essentially a natural process that we’re all going through in language learning.
Also confirm, I actually confessed this to my partner once and he was like “Well. Yeah?” and gave me an example of a suuuuper common kanji that he always does this for. Needless to say I haven’t worried about it since!
Third-ing this! This is a perfectly normal way to look up (or even just type!) kanji, even for native speakers. I see my students do it pretty often when they’re trying to put something into google translate 
My inner voice says that to me as well. I try not to feed the beast within and instead read in defiance.
Interesting. I can’t say I ever experienced this. Not sure if it’s simple mindedness or complacency, but I guess I either know it or don’t in my mind. Grew up speaking 2 languages, not sure if that has anything to do with it.
Would it be accurate you say that you feel like you are reading in English rather than in Japanese?
From observation, this bypasses the “English filter” a lot of learners have.
Just throwing this out there, but this is how you use your first language as well. You’re probably just unaware of it because you’re much more conscious about how you read Japanese as opposed to how you read your first language.
I’d be willing to bet that, as you continue reading and practicing, eventually you’ll be able to read and decode words you’ve never encountered before. Your brain is likely going to pick up on patterns over time without you being aware of it. Yeah, you’re going to make incorrect assumptions about kanji, but you made incorrect assumptions when you were learning your first language as well.