The gap between knowing cards and reading spreads
Most people who feel stuck at tarot are not stuck on meanings. They can say what each card means and then find themselves with three accurate statements that do not add up to anything (past was this, present is this, future is this) which is three fortune cookies in a row rather than a reading.
Joining them is a separate skill and it is learnable directly. It has almost nothing to do with knowing the cards better.
Say the spread as one sentence
The single most effective technique: force the cards into one grammatical sentence using connectives. Not "The Hermit, then the Three of Cups, then the Five of Pentacles" but "you withdrew, and so the connection you had faded, which is why this feels like scarcity now."
The connectives (and so, but, because, despite, which is why) are where the reading lives. Choosing between "and so" and "despite" for the same two cards produces two different readings, and having to choose is what turns interpretation into thinking.
Look for what repeats
Before interpreting anything, scan for repetition. Three Swords in a five-card spread says the situation is being handled in the head, whatever the individual cards say. Two Aces says several things are beginning at once. Three Majors says the matter carries more weight than the question implied; three Minors says it is more everyday than it feels.
Repetition is the fastest read available in tarot and it is the one beginners skip, because it does not require knowing any card individually.
Find the odd card out
In most spreads one card does not fit the pattern the others make: the single Cup among Pentacles, the only reversal, the one Major among minors. That card is usually where the reading's information is concentrated, because it is the part of the situation not behaving like the rest.
Read the group first, then read the outlier against it. "Everything here is practical except this one card about feeling" is a reading, and it arrives before you have interpreted anything in detail.
Let the position ask the question
Positions are not labels, they are questions the card is answering. "What is in the way" and "what would help" turn the same card into two different statements, and reading the position aloud before the card resolves a great deal of apparent ambiguity.
A useful discipline is to read every position as a question and every card as its answer, in that order, before attempting to connect anything. Then join them up. Doing it the other way round is how spreads become three separate readings that happen to be adjacent.
Practise on spreads that are already over
The fastest way to build this is to reread old spreads from your journal for situations that have since resolved. You know how they turned out, so you can test whether the story you constructed was actually in the cards or was assembled after the fact.
This is uncomfortable and it is the only real feedback available in tarot. Readers who do it get noticeably better at reading spreads as wholes; readers who never look back keep producing three fortune cookies.