I mean, sorta? Odds are super high that you learned to decode a word into constituent parts. This includes syllables, letters, and phonemes. For some languag

I mean, sorta? Odds are super high that you learned to decode a word into constituent parts. This includes syllables, letters, and phonemes. For some languages, this also includes gender, tense, etc. The sham is that you can basically learn to read by learning to predict the missing word in a sentence all of the time. And that you can treat words in a phonetic alphabet as the same as words from a logographic set. To the point that many teachings flat out ignore the phonetic breakdown of how to decode a word. This is often hilariously displayed by having people not realize that English uses a phonetic symbol set. To your edit, both? I used the example of "sake" earlier. Just decoding that word, you can see roughly how it can be pronounced. Knowing that I said I was "drinking sake" likely changed how you originally pronounced it. But if you don't know what sake is, then it will take a lot of context to fill in the meaning for you. And a lot of learning is pitting words against expected meanings. Amelia Bedelia is a great set of books that go into this. Such that, yes, you almost certainly have to use context to really get the meaning of words, but you need to know how to decode words for a lot of that context to work out.