when you've only been taught whole words,
That is not how it works.
That is until you have learned the whole alphabet. Then you learn words letter by letter, but READ them as whole words when you know the word.
So, if you have an unknown word, obviously you can not read it as a whole word, but have to decipher it.
I'd imagine that figuring out how to do it on the fly can be rather intimidating if you've never even encountered the idea before No idea what that is supposed to mean. While you learn how to read whole words, obviously you simultaneously learn how to put them together as sounds. Otherwise no one would learn reading ... very strange attitude of yours. You basically learn: reading, writing, and the alphabet. Not sure what there is confusing about. The first 100 important words you learn as words, in parallel you learn the alphabet and how to recognize/pronounce words you did not learn yet. I for my part read half sentences "at once", sometimes the whole one.
but I can assure you from personal experience that even in a Sefer Torah, there are spaces between the words is that modern Hebrew? I was the opinion that historically they had no spaces, like Greek and Latin or Egyptian, or cuneiform.
The AI overview is interesting. I copy/paste it here:
Ancient Hebrew did not consistently use blank spaces between words. Instead, early manuscripts often used continuous strings of letters (scriptio continua) or separated words with visual markers like dots or vertical lines. Systematic spacing between words in Hebrew texts only became standard much later
The evolution of word division in Hebrew writing highlights several distinct historical phases:
* Early Inscriptions (Before 1st Millennium BCE): Some of the earliest paleo-Hebrew inscriptions occasionally employed word dividers such as vertical lines or small dots (like the famous Mesha Stele), but many texts and everyday documents ran completely together with no spaces at all.
* The Dead Sea Scrolls Era (c. 3rd Century BCE to 1st Century CE): The transition from paleo-Hebrew scripts to the square Aramaic script brought about varied scribal habits. Manuscripts from this period show a mix of formats: some use continuous text, while others leave gaps, spaces, or dots.
* The Masoretic Text (c. 6th to 10th Century CE): Medieval scribes called Masoretes standardized the vocalization (vowel points) and cantillation (chanting notes) for the Hebrew Bible. They also introduced structured spacing, paragraph breaks (using specific spacing letters like Pe and Samekh in the text), and systemized verse markers (like the sof pasuq, represented by a colon-like symbol :).
* Modern Hebrew: Modern Hebrew writing uses standard, single-character spacing between words, just like Latin-based languages, and incorporates modern punctuation.
Additionally, ancient Hebrew was written with consonants only; vowel markings and other punctuation were not added until centuries later.
Well, regarding Thai. Sometimes being able to deceiver the alphabet does not help. As it is written like it was incepted 600 years ago, and the pronunciation was different. That basically you need to know two things: the real word/meaning, and the ancient writing. Or you can not read it at all at present time. Especially loanwords from other languages. That is of course not very common. I stumbled over such a word yesterday ... but forgot already which it was, sigh. Gosh, should have made a photo or put it into my dictionary.
