And in the case of Japanese, with words consisting of multiple Kanji you can even get more context of a word from the word without knowing the word. Down to, to a lesser extent, radicals too...
Maybe words are the wrong thing to delineate by, I mean even if you haven’t heard the word ‘circumnavigate’ you can probably deduce its meaning especially with context.
People who can figure out words from radicals probably have >500 word vocabularies to begin with. I’d say if you started learning on some natural progression, you would start learning how to figure things out from radicals once you knew somewhere around 300 kanji (which would mean you have a vocabulary of 1,500 words, ish).
Before that point, you are probably going to have too much trouble generalizing.