I wonder how this applies to Chinese/Japanese? I can sometimes guess the meaning of words I don't know because I recognize the kanji. Sometimes even if I don't recognize the kanji, but recognize the radicals, I can still guess. I'm not advanced enough for this to happen often, but it does happen.
In Japanese, it is a useful strategy. Knowing the common meanings of all the jouyou kanji is very useful. My main problem when reading that way is that I often don't know all the readings. I still need to look up the word to find out how to pronounce it.
