Making sense of Greek ligatures

I’m working my way through some Greek colloquies by Demetrios Darvaris.

At most moments I can make out the font. Other times I am confounded. After some meditation I realized that this is καί.

This is a larger issue I have with reading humanist texts in Greek, e.g. this monolingual Greek dictionary. I know that handy lists of ligatures exist (like this) but I still really have trouble reading these texts. From their frequency on this board, I take it several others have learned to read them. I guess my question is – how? I’m eager to learn; these are excellent pedagogical materials, and the times I’ve managed to decode them I use them with students, to great effect.

Ligatures in early printed texts are based on manuscript practice, and don’t take much getting used to. There’s still much of value in Maunde Thompson’s Introduction to Greek and Latin Palaeography.